AFFILIATEADSERVER

Where To Get It: www.affiliateadserver.com

Price: $29

This page shows a vertical adblock in our traditional, boring right-side column. To see a horizontal block go here. (Note: ads are bogus, so don't click on them!)

Affiliateserver is an interesting product from Stockholm, Sweden. It has some unique properties we'll talk about later.

This is not actually a ClickBank RSS feed, rather, it's a feed generator.

There is no giant server somewhere, dishing out ads as requested. Instead you maintain a small database of ads that you have created, and when your visitor comes along, several of those ads are displayed. You are provided with scripts that reside on the host, along with the database. A small database file is provided to demonstrate the application.

Signup & Download

You go to the link above to sign up. It's the long-form sales letter typical of many of these products. At the bottom is the signup button, which takes you to the signup page to pay for the product. You will then go to the download page to get a zip file. You should capture the text below the download link -- this is all that's available for help. It appears to be complete and well written, but it would help if it were added to the zip file as, say, help.html or something similar.

Setup

Unzip the files and upload them to your host. There are four files: two deal with generating the adblock, one is a helper page that helps you format the adblock, and the fourth is a text file, default.ads, containing a default/demo list of ads to display. This last file will contain four ads that will demonstrate how the feed looks on the page. You can either upload this page as-is, or replace it with your own ad text.

Run the adcreator.html from your browser. This will bring up the adcreator windows where you can select one of the twelve adblock formats, and set the background, border and text colors. You can also specify a filename for the ad file, or stay with "default".

Once you're finished, click on the whitespace somewhere outside the parameter boxes. The code box will be filled according to your selections. Below the code box an ad block will appear showing you how your ads will appear. Select the code, copy it to your HTML page, upload the page, and test.

Creating Ads

The file we prepared for this page has six ads: one for each of the previous six ad feeds. But to create actual ads, you can go to ClickBank, Commission Junction or CPA Empire or any other source of products to promote. Pick out the products you want to promote, get out your creativity and write an ad! If necessary, type something into a Google search box and look at the ads in the right column of the page. Google ads have one extra line, but other than that, that's how your ad will look.

Each ad in the file is composed of four lines: the header, next is the single line of ad text, next is the display URL, and finally the actual destination URL. There should be no extra lines between ads; they run from one to the other.

The actual formatting of the ads is very liberal, and could be a little confusing. It's possible to use HTML tags within the ads, though HTML tags are not needed for line breaks. The ads shown on this page use several HTML tags: bold, italics, and color. You can also liberally sprinkle punctuation throughout the ads. It appears there are very few limitations beyond the strict requirement of four lines.

We're in no position to teach anyone how to write ads, but here's a quick tour of the mechanics.

Start with a header, or title. Actually it could be any text, but remember that it will be in bold and in a different color from the rest of the ad (though you can change the color). The header should be something that announces the product, or at least catches the eye of the reader.

Then comes the single line of ad text. This can be any length, but should be kept under 70 characters. So in 70 characters or less, describe why someone should click on the ad and spend a few seconds at your site.

Next comes the display URL. This is usually the root URL of where you're sending the visitor. This line will be a different color from the ad text, unless you change it.

Finally comes the destination URL. In our own sample ads, the display URL is www.ClickBankAdFeedReviews.com, and the destination URL is a version of this: www.ClickBankAdFeedReviews.com/cbplugin.com. This address must of course be valid or your visitor will be going to a 404 page.

Your ad file can be as large as you want (within your host's limits). Each ad consists of the four lines; the very next line will be the first line of the next ad. There should be no empty lines, unless you want a specific line in the ad to not be displayed. As we noted above, HTML tags are permissible in the ad text, though no tags are necessary for end-of-line breaks. Punctuation characters are also allowed; apparently, if it's printable ASCII, you can include it. Each ad block appears to be limited to five ads.

What Else Can You Do With This?

Lots and lots. Just for starters, let's say you have a bunch of articles you want to display, but not all at once, and you want to rotate them on your site. Just prepare an ad file of four-line teasers that point to the articles. Now, each time your page is displayed, some number of article headers are displayed; a visitor clicks on one, and off they go to view an article.

We used this trick to display a menu of article headers on the right side of the home page. Some tricks were needed to make it work. First, use the second and third lines so that the article title is in the second line. Next, add bold to the title. Then insert a <BR> break tag to create another line, and italicize the author attribution, and finally, make url, link and text colors black.

Yes, the <BR> break tag works, so you can actually have as many lines as you want; just put them all on one line, and insert the <BR> tag where needed. Click here to see the vertical column using these tricks.

Okay, one more and then we need to move on. You can also create your own ClickBank (or any other) RSS ad feed using this application. Just go get ClickBank's XML file, download some Perl utilities from CPAN to parse and filter it, write some more code to create the ads, and make it available to other Web site owners to put on their pages. You could even charge for it, and it wouldn't look much worse than the applications reviewed here. Of course, it's not really that simple, but it should be possible for someone with the skills.

The Best Feature

Here's the best feature we see: fine-tuning your site for monetization. If you'd like to maximize the 'passive' income your site can produce, pick a couple dozen or so products from ClickBank that are relevant to your site, and rotate them. After a week, review which products made you money; those that made money are the keepers. Schedule the rest to be dumped, say three a week, and replace them with three more. After a few months of that you should be making money -- maybe not enough to need to hire a CPA, but when you have to start dumping some of the worst-performing 'keepers' to try out some new products, you just have to be getting some regular checks.

When you use Adsense, you have little control over which ads are displayed, and you have no way of knowing whose ads got you those pennies, nor what the product was that was being advertised. To make money today you have to be proactive; and to be proactive, you have to be in control of what's happening on your site. This product will help you do it.

Positives:
- Least expensive of the paid feeds.
- Multiple applications.
- Not limited to any particular affiliate product source.
Negatives:
- Font size not adjustable.
- Display URL text line does not wrap; may get truncated. Our URL is fairly long and does get truncated when using the vertical ad block.
- Unusually large amount of whitespace above and below each ad.
- Horizontal ad block suffers from truncation if there's too much text in the ad.
- Downloaded zip file could use a help file.

We didn't make a very strong attempt to "break" the feed, but it does appear to have some fragility. If, for example, you try to use an ad format that isn't shown on the ad creator, either no ads will be shown, or one or more lines may be missing. Once this happened we changed the ad format to something else and run at least once, then returned to the original format, without messing with it further.