HasOffers is changing the game when it comes to starting your own affiliate network, and the best part… You can get started for free.

Starting your own affiliate network has always been extremely costly, requiring you to have money to pay for employees, pay your affiliates while you’re awaiting your initial payments to start coming in, and paying for a platform what will allow you to manage all of your employees, offers, just to name a few!

There are few options out there besides creating your own platform including the ever popular DirectTrack which can cost you $8,000 – $12,000 dollars!  So this is what makes HasOffers awesome, you see, it’s free!  Well, at least up until you reach over 250,000 clicks a month (more than that most people will need to get started) or want features that may not be included in the free version (which there aren’t many that aren’t included already!).

Even if you need to be able to process more clicks than 250,000 a month, the next other editions are still a steal compared to anything else out there!  The Pro edition costs a whopping $99/month…yep, that’s it!  for $99 bucks a month you get access to just about every feature there is and can process a whopping 500,000 clicks a month!  If you’re needing unlimited click volume a month, the Enterprise edition costs just $799/month and that’s the most you’ll pay with the plans they have!  Now compare that to the $8,000 – $12,000 that DirectTrack costs and you can see why everyone is talking about HasOffers.

So, enough about how much it costs and why I think it’s so great, let me tell you guys about some of the features of HasOffers and you can see for yourself!

Browser Targeting

So what exactly does this mean?  Well let’s put it this way, let’s say that you’re an affiliate and you’re promoting an offer for a product that checks computer registries and cleans them up…however, let’s say that I found your site while browsing the web on my iphone…  Now obviously you can’t sell this product to me on my iphone, so with HasOffers, it can automatically detect that and redirect me to an offer that is made specifically for my needs, thus increasing the chance that I’m going to convert for you, which in plain English means… More Money For You!

Already Signed Up

Let’s say you’ve already had a visitor to your site that has signed up for your offer, however, for whatever reason, they found your site again and went through your links again, HasOffers technology will automatically redirect them to a new offer that is different so that you can still make the sale and get your commission.

Simple Yet Powerful Interface

One of the biggest things I liked about this software while messing around with the demo account they sent me, was the fact that it was easy to find everything I needed to get things going.  However, even though it was simple to find everything and navigate through the software, there are a ton of powerful features packed in there like the two I mentioned above!

Customization

You can very quickly and easily customize HasOffers so that your network has it’s own look and feel.  You can very quickly change the colors, upload your own logo, and more, in just a matter of minutes.  Customizing this software to make it your own is simple.

So does HasOffers make it completely simple to get your own affiliate network running?  Well, yes and no, it’s very expensive starting up your own affiliate network, but it does help take a huge cost away allowing you to spend that money on better stuff, like paying your employees or advertising your new network!  If you’re wanting to start up an affiliate network, realize it’s expensive, but also realize that HasOffers will help you out tremendously!  Why not give it a try, it’s free?

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!

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!

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!

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!

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

Also, most people don’t like that idea of sharing which keywords are converting with these companies that allow you to track for free.  For example, Google Adwords Pixel, Yahoo’s Pixel, and even Tracking202.  This is where Prosper202 comes into play.

Prosper202 is a free PPC keyword tracking application from Wes Mahler and his crew.  It’s the same people that created Tracking202 only this tool (Prosper202) allows you to host the application directly on your hosting account if your not willing or are feeling nervous about your keyword information being out there on someone else’s server.

You can visit their site for more information about the product and all of it’s features, as I’m only going to touch on a few of the products features.

• Works with Every Single PPC Network Out There!
• Cloaks Keywords from Advertisers and Affiliate Networks keeping them a secret!
• Works with Landing Pages or With Direct Linking!

Again, it seems like a great tool, I’ve only been able to play around with it for a little while but I definitely think you should check out the service being provided by Prosper202 if your in need of a great keywords tracking application.

Also, just to give you guys a little recap and to give a little more insight on some of their other “202″ tools they have available…

• Tracking202 – PPC Keyword Tracking tool that is completely FREE of charge.  This application is hosted on their servers.  Good if you don’t have a server to put Prosper202 on and you wanting to use this program.
• Prosper202 – Same thing as Tracking202 only you can use this version on your own server thus allowing you to keep all your secret ninja like stuff from getting into the wrong hands.
• Export202 – Allows you to easily convert campaigns from one PPC campaign to another.  Currently works with Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN Adcenter.  Again this program like the other two is completely free to use.

Again, I think Wes Mahler and the team are doing a great job and I can’t wait to see what other tools they release under the “202″ brand.

Now there are tons of ways to track keywords and its not as hard as most people think, its just hard to find good information on how to do it. So, in light of that, this topic has been born. Now this post is specifically going to talk about tracking which keywords are converting in your Google Adwords account. Again there are other ways, including using PHP, subid’s, in house tracking, and more.

This method is completely free and very easy to setup which is why I wanted to show it. Your going to need a few things in order for this to work.

First and foremost, You need to be advertising an offer where the advertiser allows you to place a pixel on their website. Most CPA companies now allow this including, Azoogle, NeverblueAds, Copeac, and others. The best way to find out if your Affiliate Company does or not is to simply ask your Affiliate Manager.

Secondly, you will need to have a Google Adwords account obviously hence the blog post title!

To get started Log into your Adwords Account. Once you log in at the top in the navigation bar you’ll see a link that says Conversion Tracking. Click on that Link and you’ll see the following screen.

From the Screen above, you’ll want to check the box that says Other and hit Continue. The next page you’ll see after you hit continue is this.

On this page you are able to choose how the Google Sites Stats button will look on the offer page. I normally always just choose a white background with black text. After you have chosen this you can go ahead and hit Continue again.

On the next page you are able to select the Language, Site Security (meaning http:// or https://) and also your code is displayed that you’ll need to copy and give to your Affiliate Manager to place on the site for you. Every time I have used this it has always been http:// security. However, make sure to ask your AM first to make sure. I’m honestly not sure if it makes a difference or not.

Here is a screenshot showing the part on the third page of language, site security, and the code.

Now go ahead and give your pixel code to your Affiliate Manager and have them place it on the offer page. They will know where it goes. After they have it placed go ahead and press continue and you’ll get a screen that says “Your new Adwords tracking setup is complete. Now, test the results.” Now of course the only way to test the results is to wait until someone clicks one of your adwords ads and completes the offer. However, if you did it the way instructed above and your affiliate manager placed the pixel on the correct page you should have no problem.

Disclaimer: Some people don’t like this type of tracking as Google has all your data on which keywords are converting. I use this method on a lot of campaigns that have been running for months and I’ve never seen anything bad happen. Its totally up to you whether you track your keywords this way or not. However, it is a FREE and EASY way to track which keywords are converting for you and if you don’t have the PHP know how or don’t wish to pay for another piece of tracking software, it’s definitely better than not tracking your keywords at all.

Also, Adwords Conversion Tracking allows you to setup tracking for your Non-Adwords Campaigns which you’ll see the link on the last page. Its called Cross-Channel Tracking. I’ve never personally used their Cross-Channel Tracking so I can’t vouch as to if its good or not, but if your not tracking Yahoo or MSN with another means its definitely worth a look!

Last but not least, here is an example of how it looks with the conversion tracking on in Adwords.

AffSpy – Compare Affiliate Network Payouts