Free ClickBank Ads for All

ClickBank is a great resource for finding products to promote and profit from. But it's really designed for putting afiliates (those who will promote the products) in touch with products that they can promote. As a result it's intended for those who aggressively market products singly. But ClickBank is also a great source of income, with typical affiliate payments per product sold ranging from $20 to $100! What if you want to tap into this bounty without having to go through each product and write sales scripts for them.

For anyone with the time and patience, ClickBank produce an XML feed every evening (called the ClickBank products feed) and this contains information about all the products in the marketplace. You could download this feed, parse it into a database and then produce a ads based on the result.

One problem with this is that ClickBank's descriptions are indended, in general, to show how good a product is for an affiliate to promote. They are not promotional tools in and of themelves. For any product you producted to be effective you would have to update the title and the descriptions to be better at selling the product.

This is a lot of work, especially when you would need to create Ads or RSS feeds on top of the database. Now that's a lot of programming work.

Fortunately, several sites have already done the hard work for you. The best of these provide AdSense-lik contextual ads (for example see Celtnet's AdSense-like ClickBank Ads). Such ads look exactly like ClickBank's ads and you can typically change the style, chose which section of ClickBank to promote and chose the style so that it fits in with your site's overall context.

One problem of such ads is that they cannot be displayed alongside Google's AdSense ads because this conravenes Google's TOS (Terms of Service). [For more information on this issue see: Lami Reviews' Information on ClickBank Ads].

The only way you can mix AdSense ads with ClickBank ads at the moment is to integrate an RSS feed of ClickBank products, such that available at: ClickBank RSS Ads into your website. As RSS feeds count as news aggregation (no matter what's displayed) this falls within Google's TOS so this is OK and well within the rules. It's even quite easy to do this as all you need to do is to add the RSS feed to one of the many RSS to JavaScript converters on the web and then copy the JavaScript code into your own website (just do a web search for 'RSS to Javascript' and you'll get a whole range of results back).

One very recent innovation is the use of Images in AdSense-like ads, but based around ClickBank code. Curently these are only provided by the Celtnet ClickBank Marketplace (in their ClickBank Image-based ads product where the ads are free for anyone to use and deploy) but it probably won't be long before other vendors also begin to produce similar ad formats. After all the use of images in Ads seems to be the way that Google, themselves are going.

Why are such ads worth considering? Well, generally the barrier to putting these ads on your site is very low. Also, if you have enough traffic and enough ad clicks hey can be very lucrative. However, these ads are what's termed PPA (pay per action — you only get paid when someone buys something, whereas Google ads are PPC (pay per click). But ads based on ClickBank products give you all the usual affiliate earnings potential of promoting ClickBank products by standard meansh. This is basically $20 to $100 per purchase made through these ads. Not something to be sniffed at.

For more information, see the review at How to Use ClickBank to Monetize your Site.

So, should you be considering these ads for your site, blog or web page? I will leave that qustion up to you. Try them out, do your due diligence and find out what works best for your site.

Why You Should NEVER 'ContactThem'

Or why the 'ContactThem' emails are a tempting scam...

If, like me, you have an internet presence then you've probably seen one of a rash of eMails going round that read something like this:

Subject: I’ve visited your website http://www.celtnet.org.uk

Hi,

We’ve seen your website at http://www.celtnet.org.uk and we love it!

We see that your traffic rank is 349,775

and your link popularity is 356.

Also, you have been online since 4/15/2004.

With that kind of traffic, we will pay you up to $4,800/month to advertise our links on your website.

If you’re interested, read our terms from this page: http://www.contactthem.ws/hit.php?s=10&p=2&w=103047

Sincerely,

Tony Gagliardi

The ContactThem Network

I've been receiving two or three (at least) of these messages each and every day. Each one refers to a different page or sub-section of my site and and they all come from different senders (but each one is in the "The ContactThem Network") and they all have different referral links. It was becoming a nuisance, and the offers also looked too tempting to be real.

I'm always on the look out for new web scams and the latest of these all go up on my Internet Scams Pages. I simply just had to look into this...

When you click on one of the referral links you're taken to a very snazzy website and an audio track starts and begins to read the content of the web page to you. It all looks very professional and it's done very well as a squeeze page. You're very tempted to click on the affiliate link or to join the program. After all who couldn't resist a passive income of “up to $4,800/month” just to display some links and banners on your website or blog. After all, it just sounds like an offer for text link or banner advertising. What's actually happening is that they're trying to recruit you into a multi-tier affiliate program.

When I began to dig further it didn't take me long to find out that the person behind ContactThem network is Stephan Ducharme, the man behind the famous (or should I say, infamous), 'Free Google Ads'. Yes, this is Stephan Ducharme, “The FreeAdGuru”.

What Ducharme is trying to do here is to get you to buy the ContactThem software product which extracts user and website details from a number of databases and allows you to use this personalized information to send out a mass mailing. Indeed, if you've ever recieved an email like the one described above then you're a 'victim' of Ducharmes ContactThem software product. One of the product's affiliates extracted YOUR details out of a database and spammed you with their ContactThem affiliate link…

You're being spammed here and the offer is only for you to join the band of spammers. I believe the product costs $50 per month (or thereabouts) and only by recruiting more into the spam brigade can you begin to make any money. It's a hybrid between affiliate marketing and MLM in that you need to recruit more people into the system to make money. Only with the twist that you're using the product not to sell anything or offer a service but to spam others.

I have to give it to Stephan Ducharme in that he writes excellent copy and is a dab hand at getting a viral campaign up and running in record time. He's obviously raking it in from this launch... But he's also notorious for atrocious customer service, not honouring refunds and massivlely under-delivering on his product promises.

This is a scam and a home for spammers, If you get any email like this just hit the delete button or add it to your spam filters...

SEO-friendly Links for Charity

This post crosses across two of my Bologs and functions of my website. Firstly I'm seeking donations to help my One Million People campaign where I'm trying to get 1 Million People all over the internet to donate 50-cents apiece to help educate the children of Liberian refugees stranded in Senegal, West Africa after the 1999-2003 civil war in Liberia and Sierra Leone.

But the One Million People campaign is also a chance for you to get some much needed SEO publicity for your website. As a 'thank you' for anyone who donates $1 or even 50-cents at my One Million People campaign page I'm giving you the chance to upload your image, a profile of yourself and your website/blog URL to my database. The links immediately go live on the One Million People campaign home page and you get a direct SEO-friendly link to the website you defined from that page. You also get a link to your personal profile page and your URL link is also made live there, too. For just 50-cents you can get two SEO-friendly links from a high traffic page to your own website. In addition, you get the kudos of being associated with this campaign.

So, go to the One Million People capmaign page today and become one of the canpaign's sponsors. You can also help by submitting articles to Celtnet Articles directory. Again this gets you links back to your website, but the more articles we have the more money we can make from AdSense and other ads to provide to the campaign we're running. It's only a 2-minute sign-up process to join and you can write articles on just about anything. If your subject isn't there then just use the contact form linked from the Celtnet Articles directory to drop us a line and we'll add that category for you. Submit enough articles of good enough quality and you will becme a 'Celtnet Articles' expert author. You may even become an article moderator with the rights to submit articles directly into the database.

The campaign here is also being supported from the Africa Aid Blog and news of our efforts are spreading. Why not become part of the Celtnet community today and help those who have suffered so much make a better life for their children.

Pay-per-Play ads and Other Announcements

An update on the Pay-per-Play advertising system. The Pay Per Play Ads System is currently in active testing and will be in testing for the next three weeks or os. However, this is the only time where the system will allow you to get your own first and second-tier affiliates for the system. So I urge you to visit Pay Per Play Marketing now and sign-up for the system. Then begin promoting the system to start creating your down-line.

During this testing period you may get ads on your site if you get more than 10 page impressions a day. Otherwise ads will not be delivered until the system goes live. This gives you a couple of weeks to grab the ad code and to start propagating the code through your web pages. By the beginning of March you can begin to see how your ads are performing. So, sign-up with the Pay-per-Play system at their Sign-up Page today.

Today I've also released the latest version of my Celtnet ClickBank Marketplace a human-edited version of the ClickBank products system which is fully searchable and comes with free ClickBank Ads generation systems so that you can market ClickBank products on your web pages.

I've also released the latest version of the Celtnet eZine today which focusses on ways you can increase the revenue from your website or blog. A theme that's echoed in my recent article on Expanding your Advertising Revenue Streams.

Which reminds me to inform all my readers that the Celtnet Articles site is now live. Here you can easily register and submit your own articles on any subject. You get 3 links in your resource box and you can submit articles on just about any subject. All approved articles are published at the end of the day and ads are submitted to the major news aggregators via RSS feeds so you're guaranteed of maximal exposure for your ads.

Pay-Per-Play Advertising For Your Site

A new buzz is slowly bubbling through the Internet Marketing community. It's all about a new advertising phenomenon, Pay-per-Play Advertising (PPP) that could take the internet by storm.

Every now and then something completely new comes along in terms of internet advertising. I've just found out about a new form of internet advertising that I believe will catch-on very quickly. At this present moment in time you also have the ability to join for free and earn money for playing sounds on your website, just a small piece of code is required.

Pay-Per-Play (PPP) advertising is the name of this revolution. PPP works on a bid management system similar to Google AdWords and will compensate publishers just like Google AdSense but with one critical difference... Publishers (website owners) earn revenue on 100% of their traffic... no clicks necessary!

You can find out more about PPP marketing at: Pay Per Play Marketing here.

PPP is a way for advertisers to serve 5-second audio ads to a website's visitors. But because websites serve a whole range of interests, topic and niches PPP offers advertisers a way to reach their target audience (and that audience can be very targeted and is the only form of media whose impressions and ad placements are verified by an independent 3rd party.

The ads themselves are very professional (many are made by the biggest players in the industry) and you don't have to serve them on your website. Rather, you just sign-up to the system and grab a short piece of javascript that you embed into each of your websites and you're done. Now, we all know that audio on websites can be very annoying, but the ads served here are only five seconds long and they run (and finish) as soon as your web page has loaded. As a result they're not too distracting and are easily ignored by your site's visitors.

The system currently has 66 000 advertisers (and growing) and because there's nothing to click and the ad plays as soon as the web page is loaded you get paid each time an ad is played! The compensation plan is also quite generous.

As a website owner you get 25% of the amount bid by the publisher for their ad (this is much more than Google). You can also earn by referring other website owners, online marketing firms, fortune 500 companies, etc. to run PPP ads on their website(s). You will earn a healthy 5% of the total amount that our advertisers spend running ads on your referrals website(s). You also earn 5% of the amount that the advertiser spends on PPP ads played on the website(s) that your direct referrals bring on board. As a result there are 3 levels of commission. Each potentially bringing you a very healthy income each and every week! But the quicker you get on this bandwaggon, the better it is for you.

Or, if you're already sold on this exciting development, why not go directly to the Sign-up Page.

Improved ClickBank Contextual Ads for your Site

Anyone following this blog and other postings I've been making both here and on my website will know that I've been working for about 3 months on creating ClickBank based ads that are free for everyone to use. Well, following a few comments about my ads and some snide remarks I've been busy completely re-designing them.

If this is news to you, then let me explain. ClickBank is the web's largest collection of electronic products ready for immediate download. Each product is backed by ClickBank's 56-day money-back guarantee. If you sign-up to ClickBank and become an affiliate you will make between $20 and $100 on every product sold through your affiliate ID. Unfortunately, however, ClickBank is designed for putting authors (those who write the products) in contact with affiliates (those who market the products). As a result ClickBank products are geared towards gaining affiliates rather than selling products.

This was the problem I had, so I decided to do something about it. ClickBank makes a data feed available of all their products. I grab this every weekend and load it into a database. I then create images for each product website and then change the affiliate-based product titles and descriptions to descriptions that will sell the product. All this being done by hand. The result is the Celtnet ClickBank Marketplace where you can view and search for any product in the ClickBank marketplace based on my new descriptions.

Once this was done I realized that I had a very powerful tool on my hands. A little work and I could offer websites ads, just like Google AdSense ads but based on ClickBank products. This let to my creation of the ClickBank Ads generation page. Here you can get contextual ads, just like Google's, RSS feeds, image-based ads and ClickBank based search scripts all free for everyone to use. The big thing here were the Clickbank contextual ads. The code worked well, but the ads were a little amateurish when they first came out. I was busy refining the selection options so you could display he ads exactly how you wanted and with any option of ClickBank search products you wanted. But the ads themselves were a bit flaky.

That was my downfall initially. So, I've spent the past two days completely writing the Ad code. They are now much more professional and you can get them to look almost exactly like AdSense ad units if you wish. To prove this I've put up a demonstration web page at Celtnet Breads Page. Just have a look at the ads on the page. No, they're not Google AdSense ads, they're CentnetCBAds based on ClickBank products. On the lower left you'll also see how I've made ad units out of an RSS fee of ClickBank products (the code to do this will be available soon, but you can create your own ClickBank products RSS feed for free now.

As you can see the ad units I'm providing are now very professional in appearance and you get a huge range of sizes and possible appearance so you can either blend them completely to your website or you can make them totally stand out. What's more you get all these ad units for free. All you need to do is to sign-up to get a free ClickBank affiliate ID at ClickBank. Then you just go to my ClickBank Ads generation page and start creating the ads for your site.

What do I get out of it? You may ask. Well, you get the ads completely free. But for the work I've put into creating these ads I randomly assign my own ClickBank id to 8% of the ads shown on your site. If someone buys something from one of these ads I get the money. But the other 92% of all IDs go to you! Any money I make goes to my 'Help Stefan' charity campaign rather than to me so it helps the children of Liberian refugees in Senegal get an education. As a result you can monetize your website with ClickBank ads completely free whilst also knowing that you're aiding a worthwhile cause.

In my hands, on high-traffic web pages I make twice as much on those pages from ClickBank sales as I do from the whole of the rest of my site with AdSense. Now that can't be bad. So, why not check out my ClickBank Ads today and grab yourself a piece of the action?!

Recent Events and Lessons for Webmasters

Two recent events in the news: Microsoft's offer for Yahoo! and the 'Anonymous' group's Google Bomb attack on the scentologists provide both salutary and informative lessons for all webmasters.

Microsoft's recent attempt to take over Yahoo! shows both the vulnerability of web-based companies (Yahoo!'s shares have slid dramatically in recent weeks) whilst also showing how important the internet space is. Yahoo! is one of the most recognized of web brands and Yahoo! dominates many areas of the web sphere. Yahoo's search (though trailing behind Google) is still the second most widely employed on the web. This makes Yahoo! a good fit for Microsoft and also means that Microsoft is after an even larger slice of internet revenue.

These are all hopeful signs for all of us with an internet presence. Both as there's a chance of a company developing that will give Google a run for it's money. Also it indicates that spending on internet advertising will continue to grow and that Microsoft wants a bigger slice of this pie. This projected growth of the internet as a marketplace also has significant implications on how businesses (and most especially small websites) do business on the internet. In a more crowded internet it's the large 'authority' sites who will ultimately triumph over their smaller brethren. This is something I've been saying for many years. Small 'niche' sites may not be dead yet, but their period of usefulness is drawing to a close and it's something that I point out in my eBook Maximize your Website Traffic, which has now been newly updated for 2008.

The other newsworthy event of the past week was the attack perpetrated by the 'anonymous' group on the Scientologists. You can read my analysis of this attack at Simple Techniques Still Work - The Case of a Google Bomb. Wikipedia defines a Google Bomb as:

A Google bomb (also referred to as a 'link bomb') is Internet slang for a certain kind of attempt to influence the ranking of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine, often with humorous or political intentions. Because of the way that Google's algorithm works, a page will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that page use consistent anchor text. A Google bomb is created if a large number of sites link to the page in this manner. Google bomb is used both as a verb and a noun. The phrase "Google bombing" was introduced to the New Oxford American Dictionary in May 2005. Google bombing is closely related to spamdexing, the practice of deliberately modifying HTML pages to increase the chance of their being placed close to the beginning of search engine results, or to influence the category to which the page is assigned in a misleading or dishonest manner.

This is interesting as Google claimed, during 2007 that they had put in place measures that would prevent this kind of attack. This still didn’t prevent the Anonymous group from getting the Church of Scientology ranked third in Google for the term ‘dangerous cult’. Now, I certainly don’t condone this kind of attack. However, the strategies employed (some of them at least) point towards very good learning lessons for internet marketers.

Now, according to Google sites shouldn’t be ranked for a search term if those terms are not actually on the website being pointed at. The interesting thing here is that the term ‘dangerous’ was on the Scientology website, but the term ‘cult’ was not. Thus Scientology should not be ranked for the search term ‘dangerous cult’ — but it was!

The term ‘cult’ was only found in the links pointing towards the website which means that anchor text is still very important in getting a web page ranked for a certain term. The more in-bound links you have with that term in it pointing to your website or web page the more likely you are of being ranked for that search term!

This is interesting as a careful analysis of this 'Google bomb' attack reveals several methods webmasters can use to improve the ranking of their site and to get their sites listed for keywords and terms that are not part of the site's text.

In brief, what the the strategies employed by the ‘Anonymous’ group shows us is that:

• in-bound links are still the most important factor for rankings


• Page content matters for ranking


• Anchor text still matters for keyword targeting


• Keywords matter and keyword density is important


• Link authority matters. The more links from high PR sites ir ‘topical’ sites, the better


• Generating ‘buzz’ from social media sites and press releases matters


• Timeliness matters. The more link density you can create in a short time, the better


• The domain name itself is important. If you own the domain name to a search term you are going to rank well, regardless of content

This is all very interesting and gives the lie to Google's statements of last year (though I'm certain that Google's developers are already busy plugging the apparent gaps in their algorithms).

Yet, the techniques described above do work (at least for the present) and I've just added a new section to my Maximize your Website Traffic ebook to show how this Google bomb attack relates to the wealth of techniques described in the ebook.

I'm sure there will be more fallout from the two events described above over the following weeks. For the moment, however, it's just interesting to sit back and consider the implications.

Celtnet ClickBank Ads Expanded

I know that this blog has been quiet for a while now. Partly that's because I've been working had on the ClickBank part of my site. And now it's an awesome hand-crafted site with search tools, hand-annotated product descriptions, product images, search tools (which you can use on your own sites) as well as ad generation tools so you can get contextual AdSense-like Ads based on ClickBank products. The newest tool being an ad generator that embeds images along with the contextual ads. This is a real killer ad system that dramatically increases click-throughs and is available nowhere else... I now have over 1400 ad units actively being used and 250 RSS feeds in use, and that's only after 10 weeks of the system being live! Why not grab your copy of these ads today...

I've also been away visiting my wife in Senegal and presenting the Liberian community in Dakar with the money I've made from various parts of my Celtnet site as part of my Help Stefan Charity Campaign. Enough money having been gained to give two of the Liberian refugee children an education for 2008. But for this year I'm setting myself a much more challenging target: and that is to make a minimum of $10 000 for the first half of 2008 (and even more in the second half).

As a result of this I've been significantly beefing-up my ClickBank Marketplace. The site is updated every weekend now with the very latest ClickBank marketplace feed. As a result, the products and rankings in the system are guaranteed of being up-to-date. Even better, all products are instantly associated with an image of the product website and within a few days the products gain a human-edited product description. As a result the default product description from ClickBank, which is invariably affiliate-centric (saying how good the product is for Affiliates to promote). The new descriptions are all intended to describe the product and to sell it. As a result the ClickBank Marketplace search functionality is much better than ClickBank's own, especially if you're looking for a product to promote. This is why I've made the search code that drives the Celtnet ClickBank Search System available to anyone, so you can put it on your own site. You populate with your own ClickBank nickname so any sales made are credited to you.

But the real 'big thing' here are the AdSense-like contextual ads that you can create on this site. The ClickBank AdSense-like ads page allows you to generate AdSense-like contextual ads for ClickBank products. Just like adsense you can define the size and appearance of the ads. You can also define the section of ClickBank products you want your ads from, as well as defining your own keywords to return and products you need. Once you've defined your ads, a simple click of a button will produce the ad for you. You get to see an example of the ad you've created as well as getting a single line of code that you just copy and paste into your own website (exactly the same way that Google's AdSense works).

But why should you use these ads? Well, the product information is written by hand and it seeks to sell the product. The code you get links directly to the database I've created so each time the ClickBank product feed is updated your products are automatically updated as well. The script is also completely dynamic so that on each page refresh you get a completely new set of ad, again just like AdSense. Unlike AdSense, however, you only get paid when someone buys a product through you link (you define your ClickBank nickname when you create your ads sets.

The newest 'killer app' in my suite of tools is a system for creating ClickBank AdSense-like ads with Images... Here you define your ad block size and the colour scheme, but instead of getting plain text ads you also get an embedded image of the product website. It's been shown that images draw the eyes and that images also increase click-thorughs several fold. So these really could be the killer ad system for your website. Like all my other tools, it's completely free to employ and deploy and the script is dynamic so he ads change and rotate on each refresh.

To learn more about these ad systems, please go to my ClickBank Ads Generator page. There you will also learn about how you can generate ClickBank RSS feed ads so that you can mix ClickBank ads with AdSense ads or use ClickBank ads in blogs and other aggregators.

Whilst I've been away, I've been running some experiments in terms of replacing regular AdSense ads with my own ClickBank ads and mixing AdSense ads with ClickBank product RSS feeds. The results of these experiments (so far anyway) are detailed in my January 23rd eZine and it makes for very interesting reading.

But what's in it for me? I hear the cynical asking. Well, in fact, there's not that much in this for me at all. Your ClickBank 'nickname' (basically your ClickBank affiliate ID, which you can get here, free) is entered into my products so any sales made are credited to your account, rather than mine. However, what I do is that I randomly assign 8% (and not 15% or 20% like all my competitors) of all products delivered with my ClickBank ID. Any sales made with this ID are credited to my account and any proceeds go directly to fund the 'Help Stefan Charity Campaign' described above. So, not only are you getting some of the best ClickBank ad tools currently around you're also helping to support a worthwhile charity. And whilst that support continues to come in it gives me an incentive to keep updating and improving the tools that I provide for you.

Together we can become richer, so why not have a look at my tools today to see how they can improve your bottom line. Unlike other marketers and other systems you don't have to sign-up to anything to use my tools, I don't care how big or small your website is an you can use as many different ad unit sizes as you like on your pages. I believe that tools like the ones I'm providing should be made available as widely as possible and should be provided to everyone, regardless of who they are and where their site is. But, if you do find the tools useful a link back to http://www.celtnet.org.uk/auctions/marketplace.php would be appreciated!

To your continued marketing success...