For any campaign you build on pof, if you aren’t using the “cross tab report” feature, you’re missing out big time.
This report can be found by clicking on the “view cross tab report” for each campaign as shown below.

When you click on this link, its going to give you an overview of your campaign, broken down by the categories pof has, such as education, income, drinking habits, etc … Following is an example of a breakdown for “profession” for one of my campaigns

As you can see, this is quite powerful as it helps you identify within any given category what is working and who your ads appeal to more. By having this info at hand, you could omit lower converting groups, create specific campaigns for the higher converting group and bidding higher, and basically make calculated decisions based on the numbers.

When looking at these groups, I am always looking at %, and not the raw numbers shown in these report.
Here’s the quick tip. Simply head over to google spreadsheet or excel, copy a specific group from POF’s cross tab report (in our example the “profession” field) and past it in.

After this, simply created a row below it and create a spreadsheet function =(conversion/clicks)
So in by example below, this function would be as shown below =(B3/B2)

Once you’ve done this, simply drag this function across the other columns which will create a % row. By looking at this, I can see that this campaign is doing well (relatively) for “business owners” & “blue collar” and not so well for people in the “medical field”.

Based on this data, a couple things I could possibly try:
Create another campaign targeting “business owners” and “blue collars” and bid higher
Omit “medical field” professions from this campaign, and build another campaign specifically for it

As you can see, you can analyze each group to see whats working, and whats not. A good thing about using this spreadsheet is you could simply copy paste each group into the first 3 rows and get the % value for each group quickly.

For excel users, you can download the Excel equivalent (super easy to do it yourself, but for convenience):
pofCrosstabPercentage.xlsx

to pof ads success,

Remember how you felt when you made your first $100 online? The feeling of knowing you worked for yourself and earned that income 100% for yourself, by yourself ? (If you haven’t, hustle for it, you wouldn’t regret it when you hit that first milestone)

I’ve been doing affiliate marketing for over two years now and there isn’t too many days where I’d feel that same excitement; and today was actually one of those days for me … actually now while I’m writing this post.

When I was starting out in affiliate marketing, I read through countless forums/blogs/sites. Some of the info were total BS, but you learn from your own experiences and so I am not going to stop you from trying them out. As long as you are doing something, there isn’t any time wasted; you just get smarter and better at weeding out good info, implementing them.

During my journey as an online marketer, affbuzz.com was and have been one of my best source source for ideas and inspirations. It was recommended to me by one of my AMs when I was first starting out. I used to think people who got listed there were online marketing ‘gods’ doing astronomical numbers, and sort of drew a line between them from myself.

Well fast forward 2 years and here I am, on the most popular list of affbuzz.com for today (April 11)! Its a great feeling and it reminded me of the time I made my first $100 when I was starting out in this business. Wanted to take some time to reflect on this milestone, and also thank the guys over at affbuzz for running a great site.

To those of you who are new here. As a programmer, I write pretty geeky posts.
Here is a list of my posts that might help your new/future campaigns:

• better capturing your dating PPV traffic
• light weight software to bulk resize images
• doing some competitive analysis for link building
• geo target your landing page the maxmind way
• creating a social media link within your own domain
• archiving your prosper202 data for speed

to hitting your milestone,

You should be able to find some find some good reads on these sites until wickedfire comes back up; it looks to be a database corruption issue they are having.

Site #1 affbuzz.com
Many of you might already know this site. It gives you a compilation of the most popular affiliate related blogs out there and also gives you the most popular post for today/yesterday/week. You could gain some great campaign ideas, landing page optimization tips and just learn what other successful affiliates do and simply pick their brains.

Site #2 abtests.com
Great site for showing how important split testing can be. It gives you real landing page optimization tests companies out there have performed together with a short comment of why they think a given landing page outperformed the other.

Site #3 cpvden.com
This is a forum specifically for PPV. I believe the site used to be paid but the owners have opened it up to the public. I definitely get a few good ideas form it and it also teaches you how to optimize your ppv campaigns. They’ve also got a good PPV “tools” section which can be found here

Site #4 whichtestwon.com
This one is like abtests.com which shares real life landing test split test results done by various companies. There might be some overlap between the two sites but it is still interesting to see how simple changes can result in a significant boost in CTR/ROI. Also, this site will first ask you to “guess” which one of the A/B page performed better instead of showing you the results straight up, which makes it more interesting.

Site #5 (probably the best option)
Take this “opportunity” to actually build out some new campaigns, or scale your existing traffic to different traffic sources (I should probably do this myself)

UPDATE: Site #6 blog.ads.pof.com
lol Per comment, check out POF’s blog for advertising. Ben’s a cool dude and POF is one of the easiest traffic source to work with, check em out !

anyways, to temporary wickedfire alternative success

Today in this post, I am going to show you a software I found that could easily bulk add borders (of any color you choose, try to choose bright colors here). I’d suggest taking some of your winner images from your existing campaigns (if you have any), and put them through this filter, and add them to your campaigns with the same title/description/etc and see how they perform.

The software I use is irfanview and can be downloaded off their site.

Once you’ve done that, you can following these steps:

Step1: Create a folder and add images you want to add borders to

Step2: Open up IrfanView and go to file -> Batch Conversion/Rename, navigate to the folder from step1 and click on “add all”

Step3: Check the “Use Advanced options (for bulk resize …)” on the top left box, and click Advanced

Step4: In the middle column, click on “Canvas size” and click on the ‘settings’ button. Here you can enter your border width, color etc. Then click ok -> ok

Step5: Select which folder you want the batch job to output to under “output directory for result files”

Step6: Click on “start batch” and you should have your pictures with borders in the folder you specified from step 5.

to image optimizing success,

How can this data help you ?

• Know how responsive the visitor from a specific keyword is
• Discovering keywords that have a high click through, but low conversion rate (non-buying,acting keywords)
• Measuring your landing page effectiveness, are the users finding your ‘sign up’ button easily ?

These is data you could use to improve your campaigns. Here’s the link to download the
prosper202 landing page CTR plugin.

Installation is pretty straight forward,

Here is how I archive my old click/campaign data (still making them accessible online), and free up space for my prosper 202.

Step1: login to mysql and do a db backup of your current prosper202 db (or do equivalent phpmyadmin)
mysql> mysqldump -p p202 > p202backup.sql;

Step2: create a new database, you can simply name it the date you’ve archived your data
mysql> create database p202feb2011;

Step3: restore your current database you’ve backed up in step 1, to this new table
mysql> mysql -p p202feb2011 < p202backup.sql

step4: delete clicks from your current p202 installation to free up space.
mysql> TRUNCATE 202_clicks; TRUNCATE 202_clicks_spy;

step5: optional, making your archive data available online.
if you want to make your old data accessible, here is what I do. Say your main tracking domain is www.track.com … create a subdomain arc.track.com. copy your entire prosper202 folder to this new site, and in the 202-config.php file, update the $dbname variable to your archived db (in our example, p202feb2011). Now to see your archived data, simply log into arc.track.com.
Note: you can basically do this for multiple archives, simply point the $dbname to the archive you want to view, and hit your archived prosper202 domain.

There you have it. I know getting a faster server is not always an option. Enjoy your new sped up prosper202 installation and happy hustlin’

to stats success,

When I am running ppv offers, I usually like to build my own landing pages. Sometimes though, you want to test out your offer’s default lander before spending time creating/optimizing your landing page. In such case, you could simply direct link the offer page, or you could iframe the offer. Some advertisers do not like you iframing pages, so its good to check with your AM before doing it. As long as most/all of the landing page is showing in your iframe, you are usually fine.

So why do you want to iframe an offer instead of direct linking ? Here are a few reasons
* if you want to add sound (great for attention grabbing on ppv) to your landing page
* if you want to add a customized header on top of the offer. Good if you are going to promote a iq quiz offer targeted to a specific group (ex: are you smarter than [celebrity name] ? take the test and find out)
* if your landing page is too large, you can use javascript to dynamically resize your page.

So now that we know the benefits of using an iframe, here is the code to do it.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/default.css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/reset.css" />
<title>title matching your landing page</title>
 
<style type="text/css">
html, body, div, iframe { margin:0; padding:0; height:100%; }
iframe { display:block; width:100%; border:none; }
</style>
</head>
 
<body>
  <div>
   <iframe src="register.php" height="100%" width="100%" scrolling=no>
   </iframe>
  </div>
<EMBED src="voice.mp3" autostart=true loop=false volume=80 hidden=true><NOEMBED><BGSOUND src="voice.mp3"></NOEMBED>
 
</body>
</html>

The code should be pretty straight forward. You will need to replace the iframe src= part with your direct link’s URL. In my case, I am using prosper202, so I have my php redirect code set in register.php.

Also, note that I have added an audio file that will be played when the offer’s landing page loads. As you can see, you can add simple code “around” the landing page. This is a good way to add some essential customization to your landing page without having to spend to much time building out a full blown lp design when you are testing different offers out.

to ppv success,

anyways, here is a quick way to take it out if you decide so.

Step 1. Go into your [tracking202 base folder]/202-config folder and backup the template.php file
Step2. Open that template.php fine and remove the following javascript lines.

                <script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">
                    var is_ssl = ("https:" == document.location.protocol);
                    var asset_url = is_ssl ? "https://ads.tracking202.com/prosper202-topleft/" : "http://ads.tracking202.com/prosper202-topleft/";
                    document.write(unescape("%3Ciframe%20class%3D%22advertise-top-left%22%20src%3D%22"+asset_url+"%22%20scrolling%3D%22no%22%20frameborder%3\
D%220%22%3E%3C/iframe%3E"));
                </script>

3: save the file and refresh your prosper202. done

to stats success,

It probably wouldn’t benefit any long time online businesses too much.
If you are new and just starting out though, its going to give you a simple to understand overview of the Canadian tax law and prevent you from overpaying you taxes.

* I recommend viewing it in full screen (menu -> view full screen)

There’s some interesting tax related info on that site/blog, so if you found the slide useful, I’d check out some posts there.

Some post I found interesting were :
Google’s Tangled Weave of Tax Strategy
How Much Tax Do You Pay on $50 Million Jackpot Winning?
Income Tax on World Series of Poker Winner

to tax success,

Recently, I’ve started to diversify my dating traffic from social to PPV. While doing so, I came across a common problem, which is the following:

In pof/fb and any other social sites, you would usually target a specific gender when creating a dating campaign. So for example say: single guy in vancouver above 25 (fyi, this demo is too generic and prob crap).
In PPV, we know that it is better to target specific URLs (I’ve read that people do good off keywords, but I’d leave that to another post).

Ok, so when I’m promoting a dating offer on PPV, the most common target would be a targeting dating sites matching the offer you’re pushing. Problem is, these sites probably have both male and female users/visitors (unless the site’s some specific gay/lesbian type site). So lets say you’ve done your homework and know that your target URL is 80% guys 20% girls, you still don’t want to be missing out on that 20%

So here’s what I did. On your landing page, I created a “I am a guy/girl” type radio button toggle, making it default to the larger demographic, so in our example guys.

So say when a girl views your LP, she could click on “I am a girl” and have the landing page dynamically updated to show profile pictures of guys, and vise versa.

This way, you are now ‘wasting’ the minority traffic, while still capturing the majority of your demographic.
Here’s a sample page I created to illustrate my point, you could have a look at the source to copy it over to your existing dating campaigns.

Demo – capture both male/female traffic from PPV

Obviously, this trick could be applied to different things
* age filter to show appropriate link/headline
* “type of car” filter for auto insurance campaigns
* “country” filter for country specific edu offers
* different phone carriers for ringtone offers
etc …

to to success,