“One of the most time consuming aspects of being a publisher is having to manually log into different affiliate network interfaces to view your statistics. There are solutions that enable you to check figures from lots of networks in one place. Most are US focused and don’t cater for all the major UK networks, but ones that do are Staagg and Affmeter. The former pulls statistics into a web or mobile interface and is free, and the later is a downloadable tool which costs $14.95 a month.”

“Google and Microsoft are constantly improving the web interfaces for their Adwords and Adcenter PPC services. In parallel with this they are also regularly updating their desktop editors, which allow you to work offline or edit in ways the web interfaces will never easily allow.

I am huge fans of these tools. Once you have copied and pasted dozens of adverts between ad groups or edited all of your destination URLs in one go, you won’t want to go back to the web!

Here they are:

Adwords Editor

Adcenter Desktop

There are rumours of Yahoo introducing a similar desktop editor.”

“If you are an advertiser, sit down with a cup of tea and spend an hour or two listing your program in as many affiliate program directories as possible.

There’s no major UK specific directory, but you can see a selection of global directories here. The directories are listed in Google Pagerank order. Sadly, affiliate program directories were at their heydey seven or eight years ago and some of the websites listed on that page, including the first one, are no longer being managed.”

“Advertisers can find relevant publishers by seeking out websites which are promoting their rivals.

Find competitors’ affiliate program IDs or phrases in their text links for affiliates and then do a search for them with other suitable words in your favourite search engine. Or you can use software to aid you with the process.

Once you’ve found publishers linking to other sites like yours, drop them a personalised email encouraging them to also link to you and, if possible, offer them a special incentive for doing so.”

“Capture email addresses so that you can stay in touch with your site visitors and market to them again and again. To incentivise people to sign-up to your mailing list offer a freebie such as an ebook or a script. See how John Chow does it on his site.

Collect the subscriber’s details such as their IP address and the date and time they subscribed; you can produce this if anybody forgets they opted-in to your mailing list and accuses you of spamming them.”

“Most experienced Adwords advertisers are familiar with using Google’s {keyword} variable for tracking which keywords have converted into sales. There are other, lesser known, variables which can help you improve your ROI.

If you add the following code to your Commission Junction SID, you will able to see which conversions have come through Adwords ads on Google’s Search network, Content network or website Placements:

{ifsearch:-search}{ifcontent:-content}-{placement}

More detailed elucidation on dynamic parameters in Google Adwords here.”