All the buzz lately on Chat Roulette has a lot of people talking… and viewing! Over 20,000 users are accessing the peer to peer video site daily. If you’ve never been to the site before, think Instant Messaging, but with live video… and who you will meet next is completely random. For anyone who has used the site, it’s easy to get turned off, scared, paranoid or completely addicted. Like everything else… once something grabs hold, goes viral like crazy and has the whole world talking… the entrepreneur mindset says “How can I make money with this?“.
First there was MySpace… early monetization was by users who could create image resource sites, mass message users and eventually MySpaceAds came along. Then there was Facebook. Facebook was very professional in the beginning and limited users on customization, which also lacked revenue generating monetization efforts. It wasn’t til Facebook enabled their own apps, which sell virtual currently, reward users or simply allow advertising. Just like MySpace, Facebook came out with their own ad management system. Now there is Chat Roulette!
Just like MySpace and Facebook, Chat Roulette went from a small project created by a kid and exploded over night. You can read the full story on how Andrey Ternovskiy, 17-year-old high school student in Moscow created Chat Roulette and where it’s potentially going.
More importantly… how can such a site be monetized. Right now the site is completely bare bones, and just shows two videos and a chat screen. If you look at the bottom of the site, you will see a link for “Dating Service”, which rotates affiliate links to various dating sites. This may be a test and pave the way for more on site advertising???
I came across an excellent video from guy named Casey Neistat. Casey did a quick case study (but complex video) on what demographics are using Chat Roulette and how who they see popping up on the video screen, greatly effects if you will be “nexted“, or have a long/short conversion.
Here are some take aways from Casey Neistat’s video.
Demographic Users: (from rotation of 90 users)
Guys 71%
Girls 15%
Perverts: 14%
83% Young People
17% Older People
(Perverts!?… wonder why this is here? Just watch the video or try Chat Roulette and you will understand)
Yes, it’s a small case study… but the video does stir up some other user responses and can get ideas flowing. It will be interesting to see how the Chat Roulette site changes with time as it will cost more to keep running, investors get involved and the possibilities of someone acquiring the site.
Watch the video below and let me know what you think.
chat roulette from Casey Neistat on Vimeo.
Don’t forget to visit www.ZacJohnson.com and comment on new posts! Top Commenters are rewarded with fun prizes every month!
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One of the best things you can do to help sell more of whatever it is that you are selling, is to create a nice cover for it. eBooks, or DVD’s or White papers or whatever! Having an awesome cover makes them more marketable. I use a piece of software called Cover Action Pro. Here’s a short video I made showing you how it’s done.
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Happy St. Patrick’s Day and Happy Birthday to ZacJohnson.com Blog!
With today being the third year anniversary of ZJ blog, I thought it would be fitting to reflect back on the blogs growth and how it’s affected my business over the past few years.
Evolution of the ZJ Blog Design
When I first went live with this blog, I went with a very clean custom design. Nine months later, I met up with the Unique Blog Designs team and they created a new design for the blog, which looked a million times better, and was heavily improved for navigation and monetization. The key element of all designs? Better monetization each time and continuous focus on branding. You can see the progressive evolution of all three blog designs below.
Getting Out There & Bringing New Opportunities In
It’s almost been 15 years that I’ve been making money online, but it wasn’t til I started blogging about it that it got so much attention. Sometimes I do miss the days of being a quiet affiliate in the dark, but the pros definitely out weigh the cons when looking before/after ZacJohnson.com. Blogging has brought in a massive amount of new business opportunities. From building my own name brand to heavily expanding my speaking engagements, introducing new friends, helping a lot of people start making money online for the first time, and has even turning into a new six figure income source. The millions of dollars generated by my blog readers and advertisers would also agree, “Yea… I think it was a good idea after all!“.
With such success, I felt it was necessary to expand my blogging horizons. The timing and opportunity was right, and I recently acquired BloggingTips.com. With the addition of BloggingTips, I can further expand my exports in the blogging industry, while sharing valuable information across a new niche market.
Blogging is the New & Free Learning Tool of Choice
Since starting my blog in early 2007, there has been a flood of new affiliate and internet marketing blogs going live every day. Not only is blogging bringing a voice to many marketers in the industry, but it’s also allowing for new entrepreneurs to enter the market while receiving a ton of great feedback, case studies and resources for free. We are continually seeing new learning tools and membership services pushed out to those wanting to learn, but this usually comes with a high price tag. With such a drastic growth of affiliate / internet marketing information available, it’s tough to justify paying for some of these services, or that they should exist. Not all of these blogs are winners, but in the end… your only cost is the time to learn from their experiences.
Through 2010 and going forward, I’d like to focus more on providing new case studies, learning packages and what’s working for other marketers around the web. I have some great stuff in the works! 
Whether you are an advanced marketer or just starting today, the idea of starting a blog is always a good one. At a loss for what to write about? If nothing in particular, you can start by writing about your ideas, case studies, your entrepreneur journey and thoughts to look back on. You never know what your blog may turn into down the road.
As always, thanks for your continuing support as we celebrate three years of ZacJohnson.com!
Don’t forget to visit www.ZacJohnson.com and comment on new posts! Top Commenters are rewarded with fun prizes every month!
]]>Happy St. Patrick’s Day and Happy Birthday to ZacJohnson.com Blog!
With today being the third year anniversary of ZJ blog, I thought it would be fitting to reflect back on the blogs growth and how it’s affected my business over the past few years.
Evolution of the ZJ Blog Design
When I first went live with this blog, I went with a very clean custom design. Nine months later, I met up with the Unique Blog Designs team and they created a new design for the blog, which looked a million times better, and was heavily improved for navigation and monetization. The key element of all designs? Better monetization each time and continuous focus on branding. You can see the progressive evolution of all three blog designs below.
Getting Out There & Bringing New Opportunities In
It’s almost been 15 years that I’ve been making money online, but it wasn’t til I started blogging about it that it got so much attention. Sometimes I do miss the days of being a quiet affiliate in the dark, but the pros definitely out weigh the cons when looking before/after ZacJohnson.com. Blogging has brought in a massive amount of new business opportunities. From building my own name brand to heavily expanding my speaking engagements, introducing new friends, helping a lot of people start making money online for the first time, and has even turning into a new six figure income source. Yea… I think it was a good idea after all!
With such success, I felt it was necessary to expand my blogging horizons. The timing and opportunity was right, and I recently acquired BloggingTips.com. With the addition of BloggingTips, I can further expand my exports in the blogging industry, while sharing valuable information across a new niche market.
Blogging is the New & Free Learning Tool of Choice
Since starting my blog in early 2007, there has been a flood of new affiliate and internet marketing blogs going live every day. Not only is blogging bringing a voice to many marketers in the industry, but it’s also allowing for new entrepreneurs to enter the market while receiving a ton of great feedback, case studies and resources for free. We are continually seeing new learning tools and membership services pushed out to those wanting to learn, but this usually comes with a high price tag. With such a drastic growth of affiliate / internet marketing information available, it’s tough to justify paying for some of these services, or that they should exist. Not all of these blogs are winners, but in the end… your only cost is the time to learn from their experiences.
Through 2010 and going forward, I’d like to focus more on providing new case studies, learning packages and what’s working for other marketers around the web. I have some great stuff in the works!
Whether you are an advanced marketer or just starting today, the idea of starting a blog is always a good one. At a loss for what to write about? If nothing in particular, you can start by writing about your ideas, case studies, your entrepreneur journey and thoughts to look back on. You never know what your blog may turn into down the road.
As always, thanks for your continuing support as we celebrate three years of ZacJohnson.com!
Don’t forget to visit www.ZacJohnson.com and comment on new posts! Top Commenters are rewarded with fun prizes every month!
]]>
Just had an interesting idea. Have you seen Chatroulette.com yet? It’s this voyeuristic new (fun?) video experience where you randomly connect with people around the world through your web cam. Pointless you say? Well, kinda. But what if you can make some money from it? Here’s an idea for you to try.
Get a computer with a webcam and an Internet connection. Now, design an ad, to be displayed on either your computer monitor or on a sheet of paper, whatever. The point is, it’s an ad.
Example: “Love Snuggies? Get 50% off The Snuggie at XYZSnuggie.com”
Of course, XYZSnuggie.com should be your website, or affiliate link. Now, point your webcam at that ad and turn on Chatroulette and let it run. I would guess that you could get thousands and thousands of views on that ad every single day. Would people buy? I don’t know. It probably depends on the product you’re selling and the ad.
If it was me, I’d try to promote something fun and dumb, kinda like the Snuggie. Something everyone might buy, or knows about. The Chatroulette audience seems to be full of perverts and just regular curious people, so you figure out what what might sell.
On a similar/fun note, check out the video of this guy doing piano songs to random people.
I was recently searching around for a specific freelancer and wanted to utilize their services. I came across their web site and found that they had no “contact” page. They had an “about me” and “portfolio” page, but no means of contact. Also listed on the site was their Twitter feed… the next best solution, right? It would have been but, the user hadn’t made a tweet for several months, and they also disabled their “direct messaging” feature. So I eventually said, forget that!
The bottom line is, if you are an online business or freelancer, why would you make it so hard for people to get in contact with you. I can see this being an issue if you are overwhelmed with business and email requests, but most of the time this isn’t the case.
Are you easily accessible through your web site or blog? If not, you may be losing new business. Below is a list of three easy to use Wordpress plugins for adding a contact form for your web site.
Even if you aren’t running off of Wordpress, it’s still important to have your contact information readily available, even if it is just an email address or an active link to your social media accounts.
Don’t forget to visit www.ZacJohnson.com and comment on new posts! Top Commenters are rewarded with fun prizes every month!
]]>As I mentioned a few days ago, I’m shortly coming up on 5 years of blogging, which still astounds me when I think of it. There are now many people who have been blogging for five or more years, so it’s not that unusual anymore, but it’s longer than I expected to be running this blog. The official anniversary date will be May 30, 2010, which is exactly five years after my first post. In preparation for this anniversary, I’m going to run a retrospective series about this blog, blogging in general, AdSense, search engine optimization, Internet marketing, and other related topics — whatever comes to mind, I guess, as I peruse five years worth of posts.
Let’s start with a few stats. Not counting this post, I have 1048 posts, which comes out to be about 210 posts per year, or just under 18 posts per month. Oddly enough, that’s pretty close to the 20 or so working days there is in a month. My output’s decreased quite noticeably in the last year or so, mind you, but for a while I was pretty much posting something once or twice a day.
Comments… There are over 3000 approved comments. I currently have 2400 pending comments, but most of those are spam (both out-and-out spam but also lots of “I like your site!” and “Keep up the good work!” and “Nice article!” type comments) and I’ve gotten into the habit of blowing away the entire pending comment pool when it gets too big to navigate… Lots of commenters are showing up lately because the blog is near the top of list of “dofollow” blogs and everyone’s trying to get a nice juicy link from a PR4 page back to their site. Too bad I moderate all comments… if you don’t have anything worthy to say, don’t bother commenting!
I can’t say this blog ranks highly for many keywords in Google. For “adsense” it’s around #70. Even though I have a fair number of inbound links (about 50,000 according to Yahoo!), only about half of the pages on this site are actually in Google’s index and only 400 or so of them show up when you do a “site:memwg.com” query. There are different reasons for this. One is that the site’s been hacked numerous times — I took out some injection code just yesterday that was putting lots of links for popular pharmaceuticals into my pages. It’s also been losing link velocity — the speed at which incoming links are made — because I haven’t been updating it very much lately. And I don’t have a lot of deep links into the site, which is another problem — most of the links are directed at the root of the domain.
Anyhow, in part 2 we’ll actually start the retrospective by looking at 5 things I’d wish I’d done different from the beginning.
Everyone knows that one person, that one guy or gal in their industry who’s the “expert’s expert”. You know what I’m talking about. It’s that guy/gal who YOU call (you the expert), to get the super expert advice. The guy/gal that has forgotten more than you know.
In my world, one of those people is Jim Lillig (The CPA Guy). Jim is THE guy to go to when you want to know how to get into the CPA business and take a product and make a TON of money with it. What’s CPA? It’s Cost-Per-Action. It’s “like” affiliate marketing in that it’s performance-based, yes, but it’s kinda different. How so? Well, Jim will tell you. Again, you’re not going to find this level of insider info online.
So here’s the deal. I’ve been telling Jim for years to take the knowledge in his brain and start teaching it to people. In other words, empty your head into your wallet. And that’s what he’s finally done. Except for now, it’s FREE for you. Go ahead and sign up for his free Webinar on April 25 and learn everything you need to know about the CPA business.
I’m warning you though, your head is going to explode. Jim does not hold back, and he’s advanced. However, if you want the best, with all the insider information, you are going to get it. This is really an amazing offer. Jim charges a LOT of money to give this information out normally.
Anyway, go sign up and thank me later.
I just realized the other day that this blog is almost 5 years old now…. the first post was on May 30, 2005. Wow. I should do something to celebrate. But what? Let me know what you think….
Here is a simple ClickBank tracking script written in PHP that you can install on any of your websites free of charge. It can be used to track sales from AdWords and sales from EzineArticles and other article directories.
Installation
Installation is simple, just copy the index.php file shown below (after modifying it slightly) up to your web hosting service. If you’re doing EzineArticles-friendly domain serving, install it in the root of the server, otherwise you can just create a new folder and install it there. For example, I might create a folder called “burnthefat” and place the index.php file in there. Any subsequent access to “http://www.mydomain.com/burnthefat/” would invoke the script and do a redirection.
Before uploading the script, be sure to modify the default $affiliateid and $vendorid values. They are currently set to ‘egiguere’ (my primary CB affiliate ID) and ‘burnthefat’ (the vendor ID for Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle). Set them to appropriate defaults. You can override these settings when invoking the script. (If you’re planning on using the domain with EzineArticles, you MUST set the affiliate and vendor ID values correctly because you can only link to the root of the URL with no parameters.)
Now this is totally optional, but you may also want to add these lines to a .htaccess file that you place in the same directory as the index.php file:
<Files *.log> order allow,deny deny from all </Files>
These lines ensure that no one can download the .csv files the script creates — you’ll have to fetch them yourself using an FTP client. (Like I said, optional…)
Tracking EzineArticles and Other Sites
The script looks at the referrer header and tries to build a tracking ID that incorporates part of the domain name and some kind of unique identifier. For EzineArticles, for example, it uses the “id” field (the article identifier). So you can easily tell which article of yours generated the click. It looks for “id”, “C” (which is used by GoArticles) and “kw”. You can easily modify it to look for other things.
The tracking ID generated in these cases consists of the date and time (in MMDDHHSS format — 8 characters long, i.e. “03091347″), some portion of the domain name (i.e. “ezineartic”), and the article ID (i.e. “672234″). So when you see this show up in your ClickBank report:
03091347ezineartic672234
you’ll know the click came on 13:47 on March 9 from EzineArticles article #672234.
Tracking AdWords Clicks
The script has some built-in features for tracking AdWords clicks, but only if you use a special syntax in your destination URLs, like so:
http://www.yoursite.com/?ag=rf01&nw={ifsearch:s}{ifcontent:c}
&kw={keyword:none}&pl={placement}
This is what the values mean:
- ag — an identifier for the ad group or whatever unique thing you want to track, i.e. if you have two different ad texts you might want to assign two different values here
- nw — the network being used. Note the special “{ifsearch:s}{ifcontent:c}” syntax. On the search network, the value will end up being “nw=s”, on the content network it will end up being “nw=c”. This is how you tell where the click comes from.
- kw — the keyword that triggered the ad, if known, or “none” if not known.
- pl — the website the ad was featured on if it’s shown on a third-party site.
As you see, you can pack a lot of information into the destination URL. The script will store all this information in the CSV files it creates and it will use it to create a tracking ID. The tracking ID will start with the date (MMDDHHSS as before) followed by “aw” (for “AdWords”), followed by one character for the network (“s” for search, “c” for content, “u” if unknown), followed by the ad group (the “ag” value), followed by as much of the keyword (the “kw” value) as will fit. (Tracking IDs are limited to 24 characters, remember.)
Other Sources
If the script doesn’t have enough information to create a (semi)human-readable tracking ID, it generates a random number and prefixes it with the date (in MMDDHHSS format) and uses that as the tracking ID.
Overriding Affiliate and Vendor IDs
You can set the affiliate ID and vendor ID explicitly by using the “affiliateid” and “vendorid” query parameters, as in:
http://www.feedthemuscleburnthefat.com/?vendorid=4idiots
This is useful if you want to use the same script for multiple redirections.
Analyzing the Data in Detail
The tracking IDs the script creates are meant to be easily eyeballed in the ClickBank sales report. But if you want to know more about the context of a particular tracking ID, the script stores information in simple CSV (comma-separated value) files that you can easily download and load into a spreadsheet application like Microsoft Excel. A separate file is created for each day, so the clicks for March 8, 2010 are found in “clicks.2010-03-08.csv”, in the same folder as the index.php file.
So when you see a click in your ClickBank sales report and you want to know more about it, look at the first 4 characters of the tracking ID to extract the month and day to know which file to download and open in Excel. The following data is stored, in this order:
- The full date and time
- The tracking ID
- The final affiliate ID
- The visitor’s IP address
- The full path that was requested, including any parameters
- The referrer URL, if any
- The user-agent header, if any (useful for discerning robots from humans)
The Script
Here it is. Either download this text file or copy the text below; place the text into a file called index.php and copy it up to your webserver.
<?php
//*************************************************************
//
// ClickBank Tracking Script
// Version 1.0
// Copyright 2010 by Eric Giguere
// ericgiguere@ericgiguere.com
//
// You may use this script for free on as many sites as you want.
// You cannot sell this script or otherwise claim ownership.
// This script is provided as-is, no warranties are implied.
//
// For installation instructions, see
// http://www.memwg.com/clickbank-tracking-script/
//
//*************************************************************
// Modify these values to set your affiliate ID, the vendor ID,
// and any additional data (i.e. '&page=1928') to append to the
// final hoplink after the tracking ID.
//*************************************************************
$affiliateid = $_GET['affiliateid'];
$vendorid = $_GET['vendorid'];
$extra = $_GET['extra'];
if( empty( $affiliateid ) ) $affiliateid = 'egiguere';
if( empty( $vendorid ) ) $vendorid = 'burnthefat';
//*************************************************************
// You shouldn't need to change anything below this point.
//*************************************************************
// Gather information about the visitor.
$ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
$referrer = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
$browser = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
$request = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
$reqtime = date( 'Y/m/d H:i:s T' );
$logfile = 'clicks.' . date( 'Y-m-d' ) . '.csv';
$prefix = date( 'mdHi' );
$source = '';
$tid = '';
// Check query parameters to determine if we are being called
// from AdWords. If we are, gather the requisite info. If not,
// try to figure out where we're being called from using the
// referrer header.
if( !empty( $_GET['kw'] ) || !empty( $_GET['ag'] ) || !empty( $_GET['nw'] ) ){
$nw = strtolower( $_GET['nw'] );
if( strlen( $nw ) != 1 ){
$nw = 'u';
}
$source = 'aw' . $nw;
$keyword = $_GET['kw'];
$adgroup = $_GET['ag'];
$tid = substr( $prefix . $source . $adgroup . makealphanum( $keyword ), 0, 24 );
}
// If we weren't called from AdWords, check the referrer header and
// see if we can suss out an identifier of some kind and combine it
// with the domain name to create a tracking ID.
if( empty( $tid ) && !empty( $referrer ) ){
$referrerparts = parse_url( trim( $referrer ) );
$host = ( $referrerparts['host'] ? $referrerparts['host'] :
array_shift( explode( '/', $referrerparts['path'], 2 ) ) );
$params = parse_query( $referrerparts['query'] );
$hostparts = preg_split( '/\./', $host );
$tld = count( $hostparts ) - 1;
if( $tld > 0 ){
$domain = $hostparts[$tld-1];
$ids = array( 'id', 'C', 'kw' );
foreach( $ids as $param ){
if( !empty( $params[$param] ) ){
$source = makealphanum( $params[$param] );
}
if( $source ) break;
}
if( !empty( $source ) ){
$tid = $prefix . substr( $domain . $source, -16 );
}
}
}
// Last resort: we weren't able to create a tracking ID, so
// generate a unique string to server as our ID.
if( empty( $tid ) ){
$tid = substr( getfaketid( $prefix ), 0, 24 );
}
$afflink = 'http://' . $affiliateid . '.' . $vendorid .
'.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=' . $tid . $extra;
header( "Location: $afflink" );
// Write out the data to our CSV file
$fp = fopen( $logfile, 'a' );
if( $fp ){
fputs( $fp, logmsg() );
fclose( $fp );
}
//*************************************************************
// Functions used by the code above...
//*************************************************************
// Convert the string to a lower case alphanumeric-only string
function makealphanum( $str ){
return ereg_replace( '[^a-z0-9]', '', strtolower( urldecode( $str ) ) );
}
// Parse a query string into its constituent parts
function parse_query( $var ){
$var = html_entity_decode( $var );
$var = explode( '&', $var );
$arr = array();
foreach( $var as $val ){
$x = explode( '=', $val );
$arr[$x[0]] = $x[1];
}
unset( $val, $x, $var );
return $arr;
}
// Encode URLs for saving in the CSV file by converting
// quotes and commas to URL escapes.
function csvencode( $str ){
$str = str_replace( '"', '%22', $str );
$str = str_replace( ',', '%2C', $str );
return $str;
}
// Create the line of CSV data to append to the log file
function logmsg(){
global $request;
global $ip;
global $referrer;
global $browser;
global $tid;
global $reqtime;
global $afflink;
$msg = "$reqtime,$tid,$afflink,$ip," . csvencode( $request ) . ","
. csvencode( $referrer ) . "," . csvencode( $browser );
return $msg . "\n";
}
// Generate a fake TID with the given prefix.
function getfaketid( $prefix ){
return uniqid( $prefix );
}
?>
Final Thoughts
OK, user-friendly this isn’t, I admit it. It’s very geeky. But if you’re even a bit technically inclined you should be able to install this script and use it. If you have questions about it, please leave them as comments here rather than mailing me, it’ll be more useful for others.