Tools for affiliates and affiliate managers

At Budapest Affiliate Conference I gave a seminar on tools for affiliates and affiliate managers. I would like to thank all the affiliates, managers and friends that contributed to the content of this seminar who truly deserve more credit than I do.

Security

I don’t need to explain too much on why security is important but if you ever had a computer virus or have heard of affiliate accounts getting hacked you might want to read this. Let’s start with keeping track of all your usernames, accounts and passwords. If you are using the same password for everything you do from banking, emails, affiliate accounts and forum accounts you need to stop doing this immediately. Imagine if a forum gets hacked and your username and password get compromised, perhaps you might have the same username and password at all of your affiliate accounts and next month your payments are $0 because someone ‘updated’ them for you. What if someone accessed your domain host and transferred your domain to themselves. For people who make a good living from this business you cannot compromise this any longer. Thankfully there are some low cost tools available for Mac and Windows users.

KeepassX (keepassx.org) – Mac/Win/Linux Users – FREE
1Password (1password) – Mac Users – $40/user
Roboform (roboform.com) – Windows Users – $30/user

The first program I’ll mention and is one that I personally use is KeepassX and 1Password for Mac users. With this program I can store all my usernames and create unique random passwords for all accounts. I can make all passwords with letters, number and special characters so a password that I just generated right now would like like this: 1xJGVy1v. An alternative browser based program exists for Mac and Windows users and they are 1Password and Roboform respectively. They will both store your passwords and will automatically fill out forms for you while generating unique random passwords.

True Crypt (truecrypt.org) – Mac/Win/Linux – FREE

True Crypt is a beautiful program that will encrypt any hard drive that you want. You can have your entire computer encrypted that is virtually impossible to crack. If someone were to take your hard drive and to examine it’s contents they wouldn’t be able to do anything with it as it would appear as random data. You can create a folder as large as you want, store your sacred, important and valuable files and encrypt them all. The only way to decipher them is with your True Crypt program and your password. When you load your computer you can enter a password to get it to work and be ready for work. If you are the paranoid type and feel you may encounter a situation where someone may force you to enter your password to enter into your computer, well there is a solution. Create an extra folder, store some unimportant files and create another password and drive for it. Whenever you enter your incorrect password upon launch the computer will show the dummy computer without ever exposing what is really in your computer.

Just don’t make the mistake of forgetting your password because only YOU will be able to decrypt your computer. If your computer gets lost or stolen you don’t want confidential files being in the wrong hands, True Crypt should be used by all affiliates and gaming operators.

Messenger Encryption
Paranoid that someone might be spying on your messenger or skype conversations? Just get some of the many plugins that are now appearing for all the various chat programs including MSN messenger, Skype and more. If you need help getting your computers setup to encrypt your messages just ask your tech guys, a tech friend or go to the contact page on my website. More information for one website that covers many messenger programs is http://www.secway.fr/us/products/simppro/

Productivity

ClickTale (www.rockbet.com/clicktale) – Browser – $100 and up
After the seminar I was asked what is the single most useful tool you would recommend and without hesitation I said ClickTale. It isn’t easy getting inside the head of your customers but ClickTale will give you visual feedback on your websites to improve your conversions. To use clicktale you just need to install a few lines of javascript onto your website and the program will record the mouse movements of most of your visitors. You can replay videos of your players clicking on links or hovering over a link before they click on something else. All online marketers should use this tool to get feedback on your websites, knowing where they click is one thing but watching them not click on certain links or ignoring a section of your site is worth knowing.

VMWare (www.vmware.com) – Mac/Win/Linux – $100 and up VMWare is a program available for all operating systems and gives you a great testing platform. If you are a Mac user and you need to use or test some Windows programs just install WinXP or Vista on a virtual machine and run your programs. You can also use these virtual machine operating systems to test out programs especially if you feel there may be malware, spyware or viruses. It is a safe way to test and download files without compromising your true operating system.

Virtual Box (virtualbox.org) – Mac/Win/Linux FREE
Virtual box is powerful and best of all it’s free. I have made the switch to VirtualBox but it’s good to know about this program and VMware.

All in One Messenger Programs
If you need to use MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Skype, GTalk, AIM, Jabber and ICQ (yes people still use ICQ) just register your logins into one program and keep all contacts in one place.
Adium (adium.im) – Mac – FREE
Trillian (trillian.cc) – Win – FREE
Pidgin (pidgin.im) – Win – FREE

Training & Support

Mikogo (mikogo.com) – Mac/Win – FREE
Mikogo will allow you to show your whole computer screen and invite many users to view your screen. Many professional poker coaches will use Mikogo in conjunction with Skype to teach and watch their students in action playing online poker. If you are training a new employee on how to use your backend or to teach them how to use a program, Mikogo is a great tool for this.

Camtasia (techsmith.com) – Mac/Win – $100 and up
Screen Toaster (screentoaster.com) – Mac/Win/Linux – FREE

These programs are great for recording videos of your desktop or a specified section of your computer. This tool is also used by professional poker coaches to record themselves playing poker and doing voice over recording to explain what their thought process is while playing. This tool would be great for affiliate managers who want to show how to use their affiliate backend and even better for affiliates if you want to make videos of yourself playing casinos. If you want to make a 1 minute clip of how to deposit at a poker room just get setup, record and make your deposit with voice over to produce tutorials. The possible uses are endless.

Search engine optimziation (SEO) and spying

SEO Quake (seoquake.com) – Mac/Win Firefox plugin – FREE
SEO Book & Bar (seobook.com) Mac/Win Firefox plugin – FREE
Both of these Firefox plugins will work similar but I have heard SEO Book toolbar is better than SEO Quake, so the choice is yours. Both of these toolbars will allow you to visit a website and the toolbars will show you data about that website such as: Alexa Rank, Google PageRank, Total links on Yahoo/Bing/Google, whois, archive.org to show the history of the site, compete traffic and more. From these tools I can determine how much traffic a website has and do more research on their marketing campaigns to find out what other websites are linking to them. As an affiliate manager I find this tool important for recognizing affiliates who have a lot of traffic.

SEM Rush (semrush.com) – FREE to start
If you want to look up a website and see what their top keywords are and how they rank on google, use this tool to know which affiliate is ranking for the top keywords.
Copy Scape (copyscape.com) – FREE
If someone is copying your content on your website just type in your domain and find out who has stolen your valuable content. Remember stolen content is not cool and search engines might not respect your site for not having unique content.
SpyOnWeb (spyonweb.com) – FREE
Type in an affiliate website and find out how many other sites they own or manage. You can even do the same with casino operators.
Google Insights (google.com/insights) – FREE
Find out the trends in keyword searches.
Yahoo Site Explorer (https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com) – FREE
If you think link building campaigns are the key to SEO then this tool will show you all the links any website has pointing to it.
Google Keywords (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) – FREE
Find out how often keywords are searched and find similar matches.
Wayback Machine (archive.org) – FREE
Find out what old sites used to look like or get a good idea of how often a website gets updated.

Extras

LitmusApp (litmusapp.com) – $50 and up
This website is great for testing how your newsletters look in many browsers and email clients AND to test against spam filters. Test your website in many browsers to make sure they work with the most common ones.
dotMobi (http://mtld.mobi/emulator.php) – FREE
If you have a mobile site or want to develop one use this program to do some testing on phones.
Stats Remote (statsremote.com) – $30 and up
Have all your program statistics pulled into one program to let you know your results and of course keep track of your earnings. A must have for affiliates!
Block Websites (no website) – FREE
I have many websites that distract me from doing work on my computer. Rather than using programs on my browsers to block it I prefer to get to the source and make it difficult for me to unblock them. Firefox, IE and Safari have features to block this but I find I can easily over-ride the blocks and continue to waste time. On Mac, Windows and Linux you can edit the host page for this. For further instructions send me an email to ask for help!

Thanks for taking the time to read this article. I will be making a second part to this article in the future as the tools of the trade change all the time.

If you have more useful tools to add to this article post a comment.