Click Fraud is becoming a bigger problem for affiliates with each passing year!  Did you know that 17.1% of all clickthroughs on web advertisements are considered click fraud?  That means that 17.1% of the money you spend is being wasted on clicks that aren’t even going to convert for you!  Like getting started in affiliate marketing isn’t hard enough, you now must also factor in that 17.1% of the clicks you receive are garbage.

Click Forensics, a company that specializes in monitoring and preventing internet crimes, has just released their latest report stating that 17.1% of clicks are click fraud.  This is the highest they’ve seen it since they started monitoring it in 2006!

Another interesting fact is that 30% of fraudulent clicks are now coming from bots which is a 14% increase from the last quarter!

So what exactly is Click Fraud?

According to Wikipedia:

Click fraud is a type of Internet crime that occurs in pay per click online advertising when a person, automated script, or computer program imitates a legitimate user of a web browser clicking on an ad for the purpose of generating a charge per click without having actual interest in the target of the ad’s link.

In laymen terms, Either a computer bot or a person clicks on your ads multiple times in order to cost you money, or maybe in order to look at your landing pages to try to copy them, or whatever and as a result it costs you money since they clicked on your ad!  In fact, it could just be a competitor trying to get you to drop out so they can take over your spots!  The bottom line is that Click Fraud is bad news for affiliate marketers!

What can you do to protect yourself from Click Fraud?

Well, unfortunately you’ll never be able to completely get rid of fraudulent clicks.  It’s something your always going to have to deal with as an affiliate marketer, however, there are two things you can try to help lower it or keep it low.

Stay away from 3rd Tier Search Engines

3rd Tier Search Engines or Contextual Sites like Ask.com, 7Search, Bidvertiser, etc are known to have higher click fraud percentages, so one of the best ways to avoid higher click fraud rates is to avoid the smaller engines.  While this may seem simple enough, there is one problem…  What happens if these sites are making you money?  Is there anyway to fight click fraud then?

Click Fraud Software

There are several pieces of software out there that will help you monitor for fraudulent clicks and then allow you to send in an email to each company at the end of the month in order to request a credit for any fraudulent clicks it detects.  There are several different companies that do this including Adwatcher (aff link) which is the one I want to talk about today.

Here is the reason I like Adwatcher, It’s completely free to try for 30 days.  You don’t even have to enter in a credit card or anything to use the trial either!  Also, most of these services are expensive as they charge you per clicks.  If you do 1000 clicks a month it may be 20 bucks, if you do 2000 clicks a month it may be 40 bucks, and so forth, however, if you don’t mind setting up and running adwatcher on your own server (which by the way is really easy) it’s only 29.95 bucks a month for up to 50,000 clicks or 49.95 for unlimited clicks.  It’s even cheaper if you buy a 3 months or a year in advance.

Some of you will think I’m only writing this for the commission, which I’m not afraid to admit I did include my affiliate link, however, I’ve been asked multiple times which software I use to detect click fraud and also I’ve been asked numerous times if it was bad enough a thing to worry about.  So, this is the software that I actually use myself and I truly believe it’s worth every penny!

Again, try it out for 30 days completely free, you don’t even have to enter payment details and you’ll see yourself that Adwatcher is definitely one of the best Click Fraud Software out there!

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OIOPublisher, an ad selling platform, has released Version 2 of their ever so popular plugin.  This program handles all aspects of the advertisements on your blog.  It can take care of banner ads, text links, and even paid reviews.  It basically puts your blog advertisements on auto-pilot, all you have to do is approve the banners!

This is the program I use here on Click Consultants to sell advertising and in fact it’s used by several well known bloggers including JonathanVolk, UberAffiliate, and even JohnCow.  It makes selling advertisments on a blog extremely easy.  You insert a line of code into your theme and you’re good to start selling advertising on your blog!

Again, this is an all-in-one advertising platform that handles all types of advertising and integrates easily into your site or blog, and as such, you’d think the program would cost you close to a hundred dollars, however, this software sells for only 47 dollars.  That’s right, for 47 dollars you get an advertising platform that will put your advertising on auto-pilot!

So what are some of the features of OIOPublisher?

1. Keep 100% of the what you sell your ads for!
2. Have Complete Control over your ads!
3. Your Advertising Platform runs on Auto-Pilot!
4. Possible to integrate the ad platform with any website that uses PHP
5. Purchase / account pages are now templated, editable within the admin area
6. Text links are now controlled via zones (like banner ads)
7. Performance improvements – various caching options available (more to come)
8. Full javascript ad display support
9. Entrecard Payment option integrated

As you can see there are some great features that have been put into Version 2.0 of OIOPublisher, so if you have already purchased OIOPublisher, then I defintely recommending upgrading as it’s completely free of charge.  If you haven’t purchased OIOPublisher yet, I have some great news for you!

OIOPublisher has issued me a coupon code that will take 17 dollars off of the price of OIOPublisher thus giving you this great program for 30 dollars!  Just enter clickconsultants into the coupon field at checkout to get 17 dollars off!  You won’t find a better advertising system out there for less than 30 bucks!

ACT FAST because the 17 dollar off coupon is only good for ONE WEEK!

Popularity: 13% [?]

Hey guys, so if you read my last post on using newsletters sign ups to increase profits, you noticed I’m sure, that I never actually mentioned which software I use to send out my newsletters, track my subscribers, send out autoresponders, etc.  To be completely honest, the reason I didn’t is because I didn’t even think of including it in the post.  Anyways, since I was asked in the comments which software I use, I decided to dedicate a post on which newsletter software I use and why!

When I first started affiliate marketing and building email lists, I used a free newsletter service, however, I quickly realized that with free comes lack of features and reliability.  So after only a couple months I switched over to a paid newsletter software and honestly I haven’t been disappointed in the least with it and still continue to use it two years later!

Okay, enough of the dramatic hype…what software am I using?  Actually, I’m using what most others use, Aweber!  I know, you’re shocked aren’t you?  Aweber has continued to provide me with the best features and reliability of email delivery (for the price) out of all the services I’ve tried.  They definitely give you the best bang for your buck at only 19 dollars a month to start!  The pricing increases depending on how many subscribers you have, but the more subscribers you have the more money you’d be banking anyways, so it honestly shouldn’t be a problem.

Another great thing I love about Aweber is that they boast a 99% email deliver rate, thus ensuring your emails meet their destination.  If email’s aren’t getting to your subscribers you’re losing money!!!

Aweber also offers all the other great features you’d expect from a huge company only they offer them at a price that is much cheaper than most others!  They include features like schedule newsletters, autoresponders, signup forms for your website, unlimited campaigns, and much more.  Check out their feature page for more information on all the different features they have available.

If you’re sitting there thinking to yourself that I’m sitting here trying to get you to signup for Aweber under my affiliate link so that I can make some extra bank, you’d be absolutely correct!  However, that doesn’t mean that Aweber isn’t truly a great newsletter service and a service that you should be using if you’re trying to build up your own email lists!  So quit making excuses for not purchasing this software and just do it!

Popularity: 12% [?]

I know most affiliates use these fancy keyword research tools like Wordtracker, Wordze, or Keycompete…

However, there is a free tool which is one of my favorite keyword tools that exists.  This tool is created by none other than Google themself.  Most affiliates ignore this keyword tool because of the amount of time it can take to create a large keyword list because of the limits they place on results displayed when you search using particular phrases.

Since this is one of my most used keyword tools, I decided to dedicate a small post suggesting that you seriously give this keyword tool a try and also to let those that may of used it in the past know that they have just recently updated their tool.

The single most notable change is this…

Before when you would do a search for a keyword phrase you would get a list of related keywords returned and these keywords would have two sections called Avg Search Volume: Month and Avg Search Volume.  These two sections would then have green bars under them that would allow you see how many times that keyword was searched for a month.  Obviously the more full the green bar the more it is searched per month.

With Google’s recent update to their keyword tool, now instead of little green bars, you can actually see a number displayed on the screen which will tell you an approximation on how many searches that keyword is receiving per month and also how much it receives per month on average.  Below is a picture showing the new look.  Click to enlarge it!

As you can see, this new method provides a much easier to read estimate of how many searches you can expect to see from any given keyword that you may have in your keyword list.

By using this data, you’ll be able to more accurately predict how popular a keyword is, if certain month’s provide lower searches, predict trends, and more.

If you’re not currently using Google’s free keyword tool when you’re putting together your keyword list, I highly suggest you give them a try!

If you have used them in the past, then I highly recommend that you give them another try if you stopped using their service for whatever reason.  It’s amazing simple to use, provides great suggestions, and best of all, it’s FREE!

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the new updates and also whether you currently use Google’s keyword tool or not and why!

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Hey guys, first off, let me apolize for the amount of time it took me to post this video up. I had some problems with Youtube as my video is over 10 minutes and I wasn’t sure of another good video hosting place to use. In the end I choose viddler so let me know what you guys think in the comments about them. Thanks!

Also, don’t forget to enter my contest to Win a Creative Vado!

Popularity: 17% [?]