Ideas From an Affiliate, Network Owner and Advertiser

What makes the first person blog testimonial lander so powerful?

Why do review sites convert well?

Do we need another Acai Berry or Colon offer? How do those offers convert so well?

I was on affbuzz today and saw Nickycakes post about landing page theft. So that inspired me to sharpen up my keyboard and lay down some knowledge.

Why do people steal landing pages, campaigns, creatives, ideas…..?

When I ponder this the answer seems simple. They either don’t know how to come up with their own creative ideas. So they use copying others as a crutch. Or the other reason I can come up with is they’re just to lazy. If you plan on being in this business long term those things need to change. If we all just copied each other it would be an infinite loop of us all doing the exact same thing forever. There needs to be some innovators and there’s a HUGE reward for being one of them. If you’re first to market with a concept or idea and it works you’ll make 20 times, in a few days, what others will make in months.

Now I can’t help someone “become unlazy” because I’m not motivational speaker, you’ll have to go to Tony Robbins for that. But I can give you some insight into how to come up with your own creative ideas, of how to promote something in a new way or move into a new vertical.

Some disection on what’s currently big and working in the affiliate world

There’s a few things we could break down the affiliate world but to keep things simple for this post I’m just going to break stuff into Verticals ( offers ) and presell pages ( landing pages ).

I know there’s a TON of verticals out there that are doing well and in an effort to not give aways anyones secret niche I’m going to stay with the big boys that everyone already knows about and sees everywhere. So lets focus on these verticals and find the lowest common denominators in all of them. Because if we can extract out the thing they all have in common we can parlay that to new vericals and new ideas.

Verticals:

• Weight Loss
• Business Opportunity
• Sleep
• Anti-aging
• Grants

Would you all agree these are the big boys of the affiliate world right now? Good then we’re agree’d.

What’s the one thing these verticals have in common? I know you’ve probably never looked at it this way before, but yes as I see it they all have something very in common.

People That Want These Things are in PAIN!

Read that last line 5 more times. There’s a lot of things that motivate people but when it comes to the most rudimentary or the most basic there’s are really two motivating factors:

1. Pain
2. Pleasure

We as humans are always either moving towards Pleasure or away from Pain. Would you agree with that? Now I know all the other subsets of motivation as well like keeping up with the jones, wanting love, etc. But these are even more basic then that and we’ll save the more detailed stuff to touch on in your copy for another day.

Out of these two motivators what is more motivating? Moving towards pleasure? Or moving away from pain?

Yep you guessed it PAIN motivation is much, much stronger. What’s more motivating wanting that new plasma tv ( moving towards pleasure ) or getting out of a burning house ( away from pain )?

Think about going to the Dr. and the Dr. says well you have some skin cancer and it’s going to cost $10,000 to treat. If you don’t treat it the cancer could spread to other organs and you could die. How motivating is that?

I know that’s hard to think about but it’s the facts. Pain motivates. And it motivates quickly. We in the online space have a couple of seconds to move someone to take some sort of action so I usually target the pain principles to get people motivated.

Now lets go back to our veritcals we’re focusing on.

1. Weight Loss. Are people that are fat in mental and physical pain? Yes.
2. Are people that need money in pain? Yes.
3. Are people that can’t sleep in pain? Yes.
4. Is remembering how good you used to look when you were younger painful? Yes.
5. etc. etc.

Do you see our commonality here? I’m sure you do by now.

Now that you have that knowledge lets see if if you can think of some other verticals might work through stoking that pain and leading people to a remedy? What other people are in pain? Or may be in pain and may not even know it?

• Identity theft?
• Theft?
• Fire?
• Muggers?
• People that owe more then their hosue is worth?

This is just a few fears that come to mind and guess what there is stuff to sell them. Sure their is offers out there and these are promoted but they’re being under utilized and not getting to be huge verticals in paid traffic like the before mentioned ones have.

My Invitation to you

After you read this post take some action!

Sit down with a pen and paper and write out a list of things that cause people pain. I know this isn’t a fun light hearted exercise but it’s going to allow you to allow you to see what people are going to be the most motivated. Use the old brain storming trick:

1. pull out your paper and pencil
2. set a stop watch for 5 minutes.
3. start to write down things that cause people pain
4. don’t stop writing, if you’re out of ideas just keep writing you last idea over and over for the 5 minutes as more will come to you.

If you made it through that exercise you should have a long list of pains people have that should serve your forever as long as you’re in this business. I encourage you to take these and make a memo pad on your phone of peoples pains. Because guess what? Now that you’re aware of this these pains are going to start presenting themselves to you on a daily basis. And when you get another pain just add it to your list.

Since we have a nice long list of pains now take a couple of those and see if offers exist for them and how you could market them using your current strategies that you may not have thought of.

Wow what if you found a pain their is no offer for currently? This could be your hot ticket to create your own unique offer that lots of affilaites would be excited to promote.  The sky’s the limit.

I hope you all enjoyed this post and feel free to add any fears you come up with in the comments.

Sucess,
Smaxor

P.S. Join Ads4Dough my affiliate network if you haven’t already. We constantly discuss this stuff in the office all day so they have a strong understanding of psychology and motivation and can help you make your presell pages and creatives better with it.

I know it’s been an eternity since I’ve posted. But such is life. As usual a post I responded to in WF inspired this and a lot of it is a copy from there. But I thought it was definately worth reposting for all of my readers.

QUESTION:

This thread on Wickedfire started out with with a guy talking about promoting email submit offers using pay per click and the polls strategy. If you don’ t know what the polls strategy is, it’s to build a simple poll and make people believe they’re voting for something and making their opion heard. Typicaly built on a high volume keyword like Brittney Spears. You might setup a poll that said “Is Brittney Spears a whore? Vote Now!” Which of course gets clicks,  takes them to the offer and they vote and hopefully fill in your email submit on the second page.

He Said that he’d tried everything with that had very small successes and some failures but nothing had done great. And was asking for new ideas.

REPLY:

There’s tons of ideas you can stick in front of an email submit that could help it convert better. People often just fall into traps of doing what everyone else does and that’s doing the same ol’ thing.

A good question to ask yourself from a psychological perspective is why do polls work better then direct linking the offer?

One of the reasons you could abstract out of that is you’re warming up the user to take action. There’s a rule as a sales person that says get lots of small commitments or small “yes’s” first. And the big yes is much easier.
Also typicaly polls are are aimed towards getting a response about something someone is passionate about. If you’re passionate about something, for example you think Brittney is a terrible parent that gets your emotions going doesn’t it? What typically motivates people it’s emotion right? So if you get them into an emotional state then they might be more receptive to to the next action you want them to take.

Another might be if you ask rhetorical questions then if you ask something and the obvious answer is yes like “Would you like to make an extra 200$ a month?” And they take some sort of action they’re starting the sales process in their heads, actually selling the product or service to themselves.
So with those abstracted ideas what’s some other verticals that take advantage of getting the user to take action then wanting to know what they answer is so they’re motivated to take the action to do so.

IQ offers?
Crush Offers?
Carrier Pages for ringtone offers

This is just a couple of the main stream ones that have taken off. But I’m sure if you sit back and think you’ll come up with some ideas that no one is doing yet.

You can even move away from polls if you want and move to some sort of action oriented response for some sort.

A bunch of the pages being released in diet, bizopp and resv are starting to ask little quiz warm up type questions. One for resv might be, if you could how many years would you like to lengthen your life?

At the end of the day there’s MILLIONS of good ideas out there. Sit back and think, ponder and listen and you’ll come up with some pretty cool stuff. No need to copy everyone else then you’re just always behind the curve.

In my classic style I started to respond to a post on Wickedfire and the fellow was asking if people in the forum loved affiliate marketing. At which time I got on a side tangent but I feel it’s a good read either way. With that said I think I’m going to do some posts on Affiliate Marketing as a real business series. More to come

QUAKEBUM:

“I’ve been in AM for a few years now, going on and off, I’ve had my highs and lows. I went to college, worked for a few corps, but now I’m back at home doing AM and SEO.

I’ve come to the realization that as much as I love flexibility and the money, it’s not something I could do for rest of my life (working at home all the time really bores me, I miss co-workers) nor could I ever stand having a corporate job again. So I thought about going to culinary school, perhaps starting a restaurant later because l like owning my own business.

Are you guys in it purely for the money or do you actually love doing this, I would like to hear some opinions from AMs that’s been in the industry for a few years because the beginning is always fun especially when you’re doing well money-wise.”

SMAXOR:

Nothing I’d rather be doing. This is the coolest business and can be “anything” you want.

Want to work by yourself in you basement? I did for 3-4 years. Want to have an office with lots of other like minded people? I do now. Want a non-corp office environment? Build one.

I think without ever going to a trade show like ASW or Adtech people don’t realize how big and how much potential this industry has. Honestly if you learn affiliate marketing you can expand into general direct repsonse TV marketing, radio, mail or whatever there’s pretty much unlimited potential. From both a financial and ability to control your own destiny perspective.

One thing I find interesting again and again. Is I hire a lot of people from WF, I think we have 4-5 people from WF now that work in the office. Everyone of them that comes in says “I had no idea” I just didn’t realize the possibilities. I think a lot of noobie part time affiliate marketers have this vision of some dude sitting in his underwear in front of the computer trying to make a quick buck. Where as you walk into an office that filled with fun and excitment where people are working together to make large sums of money and whole perspective changes in an instant. If you just work on your own and try to make a quick buck are you ever going to get to the place where you have multiple systems running with rev-share deals with partners to balance out your income? Probably not.

Like any other business this is as much or as little of a “business” as you want to make it.

What is a business anyways? Systems! *think about it*

It’s nothing more then systems. So you say ok one day I’m making a mint and the next I’m making nothing. What kind of systems could you put in place to smooth that out? Does it involve doing everything yourself? Or can you work with other people?

Back when i used to do blackhat seo I’d build all my automated systems myself to start. Then I realized I had more ideas then I could ever code and manage on my own. I had the resources and the knowledge of how to make it all work. So I decided to start working with partners on projects. Basically I’d find guys that were good coders, understood the business but lacked a full ability to get to that next level. We’d split our profit 50/50 and they’d code and manage and i’d come up with the ideas and get the resources. Now you’re probably thinking ok what if you the project makes $10k/day you’re going to give the other guy $5k/day? Sure. Because the goal at that point wasn’t to make as much money as I could in the short term but rather make good stable money in the long term. Now that this person was able to code and manage their project that allowed me to work with 7 other people on 7 other projects. Guess what? One or two projects went down while a few were making money and then a few were in development at all time. Which allowed me to achieve stability. Also gave me an opportunity to help some really good guys put some money in their pockets and learn the business and get to that next level.

My whole point about all this is that Affiliate Marketing can be soooooo much more then just some dude sitting in his basement banging away and anti-social. It can truely be whatever you can dream

As always just my 3 cents

Success,
Smaxor

I made a response to this post where people were talking about Affiliate Managers and their lack of industry knowledge.

“Is is just me?

or are some networks/am retarded?

So, I sign up for a network the other day and just got a call back from them yesterday. On the phone with them they verify some information then ask me how much I’m doing with other networks, what networks I’m with, then what I’m promoting.

I tell the girl one of the campaigns I’m running consistently and then ask if they have it. She replies back stating they do indeed have that offer. I ask what the payout is (they wouldn’t approve me until the next day so I couldn’t login and see.) and she says “Well, we have multiple offers”. So I say “Well, what is the highest [street] payout.” I then get the line we’ve all heard a thousand times “We like to stay competitive with our payouts/pricing.” Okay, not much I can do. I’ll just check it out tomorrow.

So this morning when I go to login and check how much they pay per lead I type in the campaign name/keywords into the search and guess what, they don’t even have the offer, yet alone “multiple offers”. That shit gets me pissed more than anything. Scrub all the leads you want (well, not really) but don’t tell me something that isn’t even true so I’ll sign up for your network. And if she was new, or really didn’t know just be honest and tell me that don’t try and lie about it. /rant” - CShoemaker

My Response:

Why you’d hire just a general sales person as an AM always perplexed me. Honestly I think an AM should be your guide in how to make money or if you need help. Almost like a psudo coach. Networks benefit from your traffic and I believe should offer you some value in return, not just hire payouts and unique offers. At least that’s always been my opinion.

I remember when I went to ASW which was my first show about 3 years ago. I walked around the floor and talked with all the AM’s at the different networks in the booths. After about 1 hour I realized they had no idea what I did. They were just sales people put there to get you to run traffic but not help you at all. Kind of strange.

As most of you know I own a network now and honestly Affiliates are not altruistic either. I’ve put a lot of time into helping affiliates figure out how to make money and giving them advice only to have them move their traffic from our network to another network for a little $ more payout. Even though I’d showed them how to get the traffic to start with.

One thing about this business is it’s very viable long term however it’s built on relationships. If you want good affiliate managers take care of the network that’s helping you and pointing you in the right directions. A lot of people in this business think it’s all about a quick buck. And yes there’s definitely that group of people. But there’s also a group of people that will be around in 5-10 years. So decide if you want to make it a career or just a couple dollars as that option is open to you at all times. If you want to make this your career or build your company around this industry honestly treat others how you want to be treated. Mike and Dani over at Copeac helped me a lot and took good care of me for years when I started and in turn I ran all my traffic to them. Could I have got a a little higher payout and made a couple more bucks somewhere else? Probably. But at the end of the day I was more interested in building a relationship as I saw this as a long term business. And not just how can I get the most money for this very offer right now. In turn Mike has helped me a lot as a network too and offered somethings to me that I’m sure haven’t been offered to other people.

At the end of the day “do un to others” and think about relationships and long term. There’s soooooo many aspects to this business from traffic sources, emailing, niches, building offers, running a network, etc, etc. You may not need all the help on those things today but if you stick with it you’ll need help eventually. So those relationships and loyalties you’ve build will serve you well.

Success,
Jason Akatiff aka Smaxor

As an affiliate sometimes we wonder why things don’t sell. Well when it comes to selling it all comes down to psychology.

( This is a repost of a response I made to a post at WickedFire.com , thought it was worth reposting here. )

ORIGINAL POSTER:

How I spent my free Facebook funds

$200.. down the drain. I thought there would be enough alcoholics or at least college students in this country to at least turn my facebook bucks into cash. I was wrong.

This is the ad I was running..

Make Beer At Home

You can make beer at home. Easily. Try it now. You have no idea what you are missing.

1,000,000 impressions….$200
310 clicks…. $200
experience… worthless

MY RESPONSE :

People are motivated by two things typically.

1. Pain
2. Pleasure

People that are in pain are much more motivated then those seeking pleasure. Lets take your teeth for example.

Scenario 1
Your teeth are dingy from all that coffee you drink and you’d like to look good for some chick or event or whatever. You go to the dentist and they say yeah I can whiten you teeth, that will be $300. So you decide to think about if you really need it that badly. Hell maybe your teeth are ok? So you talk yourself out of it and move on.

Scenario 2.
Your back right molar is starts to throb in pain all of a sudden. So you wait a bit and as the hours go on it hurts more and more. So you decide to go into the dental office and get it looked at. The dentist takes some x-ray’s and says you need a root canal. That’s going to be $1200. Do you hesitate to buy?

People in pain are always more motivated. In this scenario it was physical pain, but mental pain can be just as anguishing. The classic keeping up with the Joneses scenario like people feel like they are falling behind that pack very motivating. People that are over weight being called fat a bunch of times and looking in the mirror and feeling like shit. Motivated?

I know it’s kind of sad scenario honestly but unfortunately it’s the truth. If you can speak to peoples pain you’ll sell stuff…

I mean honestly how are you feeling about your Facebook skills right now? Think you’re good at this stuff? You just blew through $200, so you’re probably now feeling like this may not be for you huh? Stop and imagine that was your own $200. Probably feels even worse doesn’t it? If I had a report I that would tell you a step by step tutorial exactly how to make money with Facebook… would you buy it?

Haha well I don’t have one just wanted you to feel what it’s like to have that pain and then me offering up the answer. Did you feel it?

I was on vacation and didn’t have regular internet access. Luckily this wasn’t one of my main boxes and this was a site that didn’t get much traffic. But you can see why if you’re paying for traffic why it’s 100% worth it to buy a box management service.

“THIS IS A REPOST FROM A POST I MADE AT WICKEDFIRE” But I think it’s important so I’m going to republish it here.

For those you who don’t know I bought a network to be annouced later. But this has allowed me to see things from both sides of the coin. I think a lot of affiliates don’t understand how all this stuff works. And I’d like to share with yo some stuff I’ve learned with regards to shaving and scrubbing from owning a network being and affiliate the last 4 years.

First off yes there are shady advertisers and networks that get greedy and shave and scrub just to be greedy! As you would with any business partner make sure you know who you’re dealing with.

With that said there’s also a TON of good advertisers and networks out there as well. And I’d like to share with you some of the ways they look at things from their perspectives.

From the Networks perspective:

What’s the only two things network sales reps have to sell you to bring you on board? We all know the typical AM mantra….. We have a better payouts…. and unique offers.

Have you heard that before?

I’m sure you have if you have traffic and have been around long. So lets examine the better payouts as this is what comes into play here.

Alright so 90-95% of affiliate managers have never run campaigns themselves. That’s industry knowledge. So most of them are salesmen, they come into interview and get the job because they have a good personality. This is fine but they don’t know the business that well from an affiliates perspective. So their managers arm them with “Affiliates are looking for unique offers and better payouts.” And off they go to start working with us as affiliates.

Better payouts:

Now I’m not saying all networks do this by any means but I have seen it on some ( and I’m not going to mention them so don’t ask ) now that I’m on the other side. Honestly when it comes to payouts on a network it’s all about how well their side can negotiate and how good of a deal they can get. People often talk about volume, I don’t agree with that. I find most advertisers would rather have a smaller amount of very quality traffic that converts well on the backside for them rather then a large amount that sucks. Just like we’re buying traffic from sources like adwords and ysm they’re buying traffic from you. So if the network has strong publishers they get strong payouts, bottom-line.

However there’s a lot of advertisers that offer the same payout to everyone. Networks have employees and overhead and need to make a certain % on the traffic coming through in order to make a profit and cover costs. But they also have to compete in the “higher payouts” space. So this puts them between a rock and a hard place. So what’s their other options. Shaving leads. Basically making is so your pixel won’t fire sometimes going through the network. I hear this is a “feature” in Directtrack. I run a directtrack system and have yet to find it personally, but that’s not to say it isn’t there. Now lets take an example of how this plays out in real life.

AM: hey what are you running?
You: I’m running ringtones.
AM: What’s your payout?
You: $13/lead
AM: I can get you 14$ on that

Now I’m not going to preach EPC like I always do but it’s the ONLY NUMBER THAT MATTERS!

Now lets say the advertiser is only paying 14$ a lead on this how does this new network make money and still allow them to “up your payout”? Yep you guessed it they shave.

On your old network you send through 100 clicks and 15 convert to make you 13 * 15 = $195/100 clicks = 1.95$ EPC.

On your new network you send thorugh 100 clicks and 15 convert but 1 or 2 aren’t shown in your system. Which means they converted with the advertiser but you’re not getting credit. The affiliate company gets the money and we don’t get paid on it.

$14 * 13 lead = $196/100 clicks = $1.96 EPC

Effectively nothing changed for you but everyone is still making the same money and the new network got you business. So you can see the motivation for them to do this.

Now from the Advertisers Perspective:

Email submits are a classic example here so that’s what I’m going to use. But really this applies to anyone promoting free submit or lead type offers.

Stop and imagine you’re an advertiser for a second. I know we as affiliates don’t do this to often but lets do it for a second here so you can understand why things happen.

Now most advertisers know affiliates only really look at one thing, at least newer affiliates well and even some verterans for that matter. And that’s payout.

As an advertiser they’re really buying traffic/leads just like we are with PPC. They have a conversion ratio they look at as well.

Back to email submits, lets say they pay you $1.00/submit. Then you send a email submit then they send them through a co-regestration path and on average lets say make 2$ for each visitor that fills out an email submit. Every advertiser is different of course. Now lets say the traffic your sending only makes them 1$ for example so they’re breaking even with it. In that situation they have a three choices.

1. They could call the affiliate company and say this persons traffic isn’t converting for us please cut him off of this offer ( I get these calls some times )

2. They could not fire your pixel sometimes to bring their conversions into line
with your traffic. Now this is the most transparent to us as affiliates. It sucks, no question. But how do we expect the advertiser to take traffic that doesn’t make money for them.

3. Tell the affiliate manager to cut your payout and for traffic from these pubs we’ll only pay X rather then Y. This is the one I prefer mostly.

Often times when I get cut off to an offer I go back in a re-negotiate for a lower payout if you can believe that. Because it still makes good money even at the lower payout and then everyone is happy. At least that’s straight forward and not shady.

But honestly I think most advertisers just scrub/shave on the backside because it’s transparent and they think they’re not rocking the boat as much.

So when we as affiliates hear higher payouts always question it. EPC is ALLLLLLLLLL that matters. Everything else can be fudged with.

I really think there’s a lot of secrecy on both sides of the game and the more open, honest and relationship you build with your network the better. I run all my traffic sources by AM’s I work with. But I have a lot of trust in them that they’re not going to hand it out to other people. If a traffic source is questionable I ask if they’ll take the traffic. Most of the time the networks I work with say yes lets try it and see how it does. That way when you run into issues both sides know what’s going on.

Hope this sheds some light what’s going on behind the scenes as I think it’s a huge unknown. I’ll try and cover more on these relationships and how things work as I go through my learning process.

Success,
Smaxor

If you’re looking to inspire more trust with your users an SSL Certificate is always a good way to go. For example if you’re promoting auto loan leads and have a private label offer then you should have the form page be SSL protected. Both for security and improving your conversions. Up until now it’s been 50-100$ for a SSL certificate, so normally I’d roll out a site/campaign and then if it did decent I’d get an SSL certificate for it. Honestly it will increase you conversions.

Now you can get one for free with every domain purchase. Amazing!

My favorite domain registrar has been Namecheap.com for some time. They’re interface is amazing a quick as opposed to some of the other domain reg’s out there * cough godaddyd cough *. And now they’re offering free SSL certs so I’d suggest you go check them out if you’re not already a customer. Here’s the link for the offer ( not an affiliate link as I don’t think they have a program ).

Free SSL Certificate at Namecheap.com

Also you can add this nifty little badge to your page as well.

Enjoy!

As some of you know I’ve been moving to building my own offers and some other things on the advertisers side I’ll sharing later. In this quest I’ve found the most challenging thing is to flush out the fraud from the legitimate users. Everyone thinks being an advertiser is the way to go right? Affiliates send traffic and you pay them 5$ and you make 7-10$. Well if only it was that easy. Honestly being the advertiser or network would be the greatest thing since sliced bread if there wasn’t so much affiliate fraud. Now I’m not talking about Blackhat tactics or spam traffic generation stuff. I’m talking straight fraud such as stolen credit cards and lead stuffing. There’s large organized rings of fraudsters primarily in China, India, Phillipines, Vietnam, Russia, Turkey and a few other countries. So if any of my readers on from those countries and get denied for networks and offers a lot that’s why.

Why you should care

Fortunately most of the fraudsters aren’t that sophisticated from what I’ve seen, so there’s a lot of ways to flush them out of the bushes and cut your losses before they start. There’s very good reason to catch them “Before” they start. As an advertiser the last thing you want is a large number of charge backs or stolen credit cards running through your system. If enough of this happens you can be blacklisted for any merchant account. Therefore the prevention of these transactions going through is a good place to begin.

One of the hard parts about owning a network or running an offer is the careful balancing act between what you let through and what you block. You could lock down your affiliate approval or purchase system tighter then a drum and approve hardly anyone. Or you could let everyone through but these are extremes of the spectrum of course. So the goal is to build little checks in to weed out most of the fraud before it starts. One thing I’ve chosen is anyone signing up with a proxy is going to get denied. If you can’t signup with your real IP I don’t want to do business with you. Maybe I’m going to knock out some sales and some affiliates this way but it’s worth it so I don’t have to deal with as much fraud.

Now there’s no way you can block all proxies, I know this but you can weed out the simple ones by checking the regular open proxy ports which are 80, 8080, and 3128. I’ve written a little function that you pass the IP address to and return 0 or 1 based on whether those ports are open on the IP. So that when an affiliate applies or a sale goes through I check if the IP ( address of the computer) is coming from computer that has those ports open. 99.9 out of a 100 home users aren’t going to have any of those ports open.

Just take this code and stick it in your sign up form or registration form and decide how you want to deal with these orders or sign ups. You may want to just throw them into a queue to be manually checked. Or build a rating system based on points. How you handle things is up to you.

PHP Proxy Port Checking Code:

function ipProxyPortCheck($ip){
//timeout you want to use to test
$timeout = 5;
// ports we're going to check
$ports = array(80,3128,8080);
// flag to be returned 0 means safe, 1 means open and unsafe
$flag = 0;
// loop through each of the ports we're checking
foreach($ports as $port){
// this is the code that does the actual checking for the port
@$fp = fsockopen($ip,$port,$errno,$errstr,$timeout);
// test if something was returned, ie the port is open
if(!empty($fp)){
// we know the set the flag
$flag = 1;
// close our connection to the IP
fclose($fp);
}
}
// send our flag back to the calling code
return $flag;
}
// call our function and check the IP in there
echo ipProxyPortCheck('69.217.73.52');
?>

Hope this saves some advertisers and affiliate networks some time and money.

Originally I posted this over at Blackhatworld.com but thought I’d repost it on here for my readers.

Someone asked what is a pre-pop offer and how do I use it?

First of a pre-pop offer means that they allow you to populate the data in the offer with a GET uri. So for example if your form had fields “fname”, “lname”, “phone” your url to pre-pop it might look like this:

http://www.affiliateoffer.com/lander.php?fname=Smaxor&lname=Musings&phone=4082931938

So what this would do is take the user to the landing page with their first name, last name and phone number already filled in so all they have to do is hit submit and makes your conversions go way up. Not all offers support this however a lot do so just ask your affiliate manager what pre-pops they offer.

Pre-Pop is awesome especially if you have a white label or private lable offer you’re promoting. Bascialy once they fill out the first offer, we’ll use a mortgage lead as an example, you forward them to a second page or throw them a pop-up already pre-populated with the data that they filled out from the first mortgage lead offer so all they have to do is hit submit.

Some examples of numbers, when we used to run a lot of mortgage ( sucks now for mortgage ) we’d pre-pop a home owners insurance lead form. 15% would hit submit and we’d get a second 8$ pop for the same lead. Then we’d pre-pop a new window install lead offer and on and on.

1000 leads * 15% = 150 leads additional * 8 = $1200 extra for the same traffic

Good stuff. The other thing pre-pop’s are great for is if you are a mailer and have data then you can make the links that they click on have their info in them already so that when they click and go to the landing page it’s already pre-populated with their info.

So your link in the email might look like this

http://www.offer.com/page.php?name=t…one=theirphone…….

Now you’re conversion is going to go up quite a bit if their form is already filled out with their info. Also if you don’t want to use that big link in a mail or the affiliate url ( always a good idea ) you can send them to your domains and keep a database of records. So for example you use a link like this

http://www.yourdomain.com/jump.php?id=38357

Where 38357 corresponds to a record id in the database. You pull their record and then forward them to the offer with their pre-pop info.
Simple code to do this would be

<?php
// connect to your db
dbconnect();
// pull the id from the uri
$id = htmlentities(trim($_GET['id']));
// build your sql for pulling the record from the database
$sql = "SELECT * FROM records WHERE id = '$id'";
// get the result from the database for the id
$sql_result = mysql_query($sql);
// put that result into an array
$row = mysql_fetch_row($sql_result);
// here we're redirecting the user to the landing page with the pre-pop uri, this is
// assuming that first name is the second field, last name the 3rd field and phone number
// the 4th field.
echo "<meta http-equiv=\"refresh\" content=\"0;url=http://www.affiliateoffer.com/lander.php?fname={$row[1]}&lname={$row[2]}&phone={$row[3]}\"/>";
?>

Hope that helps and explains some stuff.