eBook & Internet Publishing News
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Disclosure: Our company is a ClickBank vendor and affiliate. We may earn a commission if you join ClickBank as a vendor. CBMultiLink is our company’s product.

A new version, version 3.10, of CBMultiLink our script that allows ClickBank vendors to offer their affiliates a choice of multiple landing pages is now available.

There are two main features in the new release:

1. For "normal" ClickBank landing pages, ClickBank automatically adds hop= with the nickname of the affiliate to the landing page’s URL. Many affiliates and vendors don’t like this for various reasons, including a feeling that it may encourage commission “theft” (customers substituting their affiliate ID for the actual affiliate’s so as to get some money off their purchases). So, until now, previous versions of CBMultiLink have removed the hop= from landing page URLs. However, it has come to our attention that some vendors have features on their websites that rely on the hop= being present, so we now have an option in the admin screens of CBMultiLink that allows vendors to choose - using a single mouse click - whether or not to include the hop= in their landing page URLs.
2. Although the primary purpose of CBMultiLink is to allow vendors to offer their affiliates a choice of landing pages, one extra feature we have included is an option to generate cloaked ClickBank payment links (so as to conceal the vendor ID, again to discourage commission “theft”). In version 3.10 of CBMultiLink, this feature has been further extended - vendors using ClickBank’s more advanced features such as skins for their payment form, can now include these URL parameters in their cloaked payment links.

IMPORTANT UPGRADE INSTRUCTIONS: If upgrading from a previous version of the script, assuming you want to keep your existing settings and landing pages - replace all files in the CBMultiLink installation, except do NOT replace cmconfig.php or cmconfig2.php - as these store your settings!

If all this sounds like double Dutch, don’t worry - these are new features aimed at more advanced ClickBank vendors. That said, CBMultiLink, and all the other tools in what we call the CB Vendor Power Toolkit, really are essential tools for every serious ClickBank vendor. Visit the CB Vendor Power Toolkit website to see why.

• ClickBank Advice for Affiliates & Vendors - from the ClickBank King!
• ClickBank Payment Button Graphics
• ClickBank Vendor Graphics - Turbo-charge your sales letters and pitch pages
• Why you need to secure your ClickBank Thank You Page
• Multiple Landing Pages for ClickBank Vendors
• The Ultimate Ad Tracker - tracking ads, banners, website visitors, conversion rates, and more
• Using Social Proof to Increase ClickBank Sales

• ClickBank Advice for Affiliates & Vendors - from the ClickBank King!
• What happened to the ClickBank Marketplace? ClickBank hid it, but you can still put it on your site with CBRocket 4.00
• Free Link Cloaker Script
• The Ultimate Ad Tracker - tracking ads, banners, website visitors, conversion rates, and more

Many websites need to collect information from visitors, and often the best way to do this is through forms. The advantage of forms, other than simply publishing an email contact address, is that it allows you to tell visitors exactly what information you need from them - and get them to give you that information.

Answers 2000 is Email Feedback Form Script is a powerful solution to this requirement. Some of its features include:

• It can process any type of form - forms can incorporate any fields and types of fields that you like
• Powerful and flexible validation options - for example: it can make sure an email address has been correctly entered in a required field before the form is submitted, or another field must contain a ZIP code, or another field must contain a number within a certain range, and so on.
• A single script can process an un unlimited number of different forms
• Can automatically capture the user’s IP address (this can be useful for legal purposes, as well as being handy if you find that you wish to block a particular user who is abusing your form).

As well as all these features, Email Feedback Form Script has always incorporated two additional features that help tackle the problem of spam:

1. Unlike many traditional formmail scripts, Email Feedback Form Script can not be subverted by spammers to email third parties.
2. Unlike many traditional formmail scripts, Email Feedback Form Script does not need to reveal your email address - thus preventing it being added to spam email lists.

Of course, spammers are a devious lot: Another tactic that they are increasingly using is to fill out feedback forms on websites (using automated software) with their junk, and then submit them. If you get these types of messages, you can of course always simply delete them from your inbox, but this soon gets tiresome and annoying, plus it’s time-consuming too, especially if you receive numerous junk submissions every day.

Answers 2000 is pleased to announce the release of Email Feedback Form 5.00 which includes a powerful new anti-spam feature, that can drastically cut down on the number of such spam form submissions received. This new version of the software incorporates a special “honey pot fields” feature, that allows you to automatically direct almost all junk submissions straight to the trash, while still allowing legitimate human-made submissions to be received as normal. What’s more, this feature works without using a captcha - which many people find annoying, and which can be
troublesome for visually-impaired users.

The way the “honey pot fields” work is: you add one or more additional fields to your forms, that must be left blank, or left set to required values. These fields are hidden from legitimate human users’ eyes using CSS (so are never altered), but spammer’s software will fill-out or alter these fields, thus allowing spam submissions to be detected and automatically sent to the garbage. This process is completely transparent to your legitimate human users, yet tests show it can drastically cut down on spam submissions.

Find out more, and see a demo of Email Feedback Form 5.00 at our ScriptRocket.com website.

Answers 2000 Limited today released version 5.04 of the Advanced Multimedia Extension for Activ E-Book Compiler. The software is available for purchase from the EBookPower.com, as well being available as a free upgrade to customers who have purchased any previous version of this product.

The Advanced Multimedia Extension for Activ E-Book Compiler, adds a number of powerful enhancements to Activ E-Book Compiler which make it easy to produce attractive multimedia presentations and eBooks. The features of the package include:

* Commands for playing video full screen or in pop-up windows

* Commands for controlling CD audio play back

* Commands for audio and MIDI files, as well as access to other Microsoft Windows media features

* A complete application for videoing Windows screen activity - ideal for recording website and software tutorials

* MIDI sound files in a variety of musical styles, which can be used, royalty-free, in multimedia and eBook presentations.

To find out more about the Advanced Multimedia Extension for Activ E-Book Compiler, or to download a free demo, please go to: EBookPower.com

To find out more about Activ E-Book Compiler, or to download a free trial version of the software, please go to: EBookCompiler.com

Disclosure: Our company is a customer of both NameCheap and Dotster.com. We may earn a commission if you register a domain or purchase a product/service after following a link from this article to either of these companies’ websites.

I’ve decided to move our domain name registrations over to NameCheap from Dotster.com. The main reason - to save money!

To be honest, although I never originally chose to be a Dotster customer (we were 000domains.com customers, and became Dotster customers after they bought 000domains), I’ve been generally very happy with Dotster. Yes, there have long been other slightly cheaper registrars, but it always seemed like a lot of hassle to transfer a large portfolio of domains from one registrar to another. Over the years. however, Dotster prices have crept up, and so the incentive to switch registrar has gradually risen.

However, the thing that finally caused me to switch, was when I urgently needed to purchase a new domain, but couldn’t do it through Dotster. Apparently, there was some kind of glitch in getting my credit card accepted by their anti-fraud measures (the same credit card which had previously been used for many thousands of dollars of domain registrations and renewals with the company). Dotster support seemed unable to resolve the issue, I couldn’t wait, so I opened an account with NameCheap - who had been recommended to me by a friend (and turned out to be cheaper too).

I’ve now registered several new domains with NameCheap, am very happy with them, so I’ve decided to start transferring existing domains over too.

Here’s the procedure I am using (Note: If you do this, make sure the domain’s admin contact email works correctly before starting. domain privacy is turned off, and that the domain has been active for at least 60 days. You might also want to make sure it isn’t about to imminently expire, since the transfer process takes time):

1. Log-in to Dotster.com - unlock the domain(s) I want to transfer, and request the Auth Code(s) for each one.

2. Wait for the emails from Dotster to arrive (say 20 minutes), and copy and paste the domain names into a text file (which I create using Notepad). The file has this format, one domain name per-line:

DOMAIN-NAME-1.COM,AUTHCODE-1
DOMAIN-NAME-2.COM,AUTHCODE-2
DOMAIN-NAME-3.COM,AUTHCODE-3
etc.

3. Go to NameCheap, and click Transfer, then copy and paste the list of domain names and Auth-codes (which NameCheap calls “EPPs”) into the bulk transfer field. Pay and wait (again a few minutes is usually enough).

4. I receive an email for each domain asking me to approve the transfer to NameCheap, and I must click the link to open an approval page, and then select “Approve”.

5. Step 5 wait.

In summary, it’s a little tedious, but it isn’t hard-work, and it isn’t too time-consuming. Since I’m transferring a fairly large number of domains, it would be easy to lose track of my progress, accidentally miss a step on one domain name, etc., so I printed out a list of all the domains, and am ticking off the steps one-by-one next to each name in the list.

Update: A few things happened after I made this post:

1. The old registrar, Dotster, sent me an email to confirm I wanted to transfer each domain. If I had ignored this email, the domain would have transferred eventually, but I sped things a long by clicking a link in the email and approving the transfer. (I also had an option to reject the transfer).

2. The domain transferred successfully to NameCheap.

3. I checked the domain was working and all the details correct at NameCheap. One glitch was the billing contact wasn’t - it said NameCheap. So I copied the Registrant info in the Billing contact (with a single button click). NameCheap gives a warning that I may need to verify my contact info if I change contact details (see this article for why), but as far as I can tell, I don’t think that’s required, because I only changed the Billing Contact, not the Registrant. I’ll post a second update, if verification is required.

Also: I forgot to mention, a year gets added on to the domain’s expiry after the transfer.

Finally: Right now, the transferred domain is still showing in the Dotster control panel (as well as in the NameCheap panel). Presumably it should disappear from Dotster soon (?).

Update 2:

1. I did need to verify my contact details.

2. When transferring some further domains to NameCheap, I also needed them to whitelist one of the names which somehow triggered their filters for bad (e.g. phishing) names.

Disclosure: Our company is a ClickBank vendor and affiliate. We may earn a commission if you join ClickBank as a vendor. CBMultiLink is our company’s product.

If you are a ClickBank affiliate, one thing that you may wish to do is “redesign” a vendor’s offer page, so as to present the product pitch in a different way. There are several reasons why you might want to do this, including:

1. You might believe that you can create a more effective or more attractive offer page.
2. You might want to tailor the pitch so as to appeal to your audience.
3. Some vendors that offer multiple products for sale will set affiliate traffic to link to the home page of their site - but an affiliate (you) who wants to promote only a particular product, might prefer to skip these intermediate steps, and send the buyer directly to the payment link. Note: Vendors with multiple products would be well-advised to get a copy of CBMultiLink, as they can use that to allow their affiliates to link directly to both their home page, and product-specific pages).

The first question is: Is it allowed, within ClickBank’s rules, for an affiliate to redesign a sales offer page?

My understanding at the time of writing (check with ClickBank’s terms of service or ask them if unsure) is that it permitted, but only if the affiliate gets the explicit permission of the vendor in question.

The second question is: How to do it?

Anyway, what you need to do is do View Source on the vendor’s sales page. Look for the ClickBank payment link, which should look something like this:

http://productid.vendor.pay.clickbank.net

Where
- productid identifies the product, and is usually (but not always) a number.
- vendor is the vendor’s ClickBank nickname.

Now design your own offer page, and for the payment link, insert a link to.

http://productid.affiliate_vendor.pay.clickbank.net

Where
- productid is copied directly from the original payment link
- vendor is also copied directly from the original payment link
- affiliate is your ClickBank nickname

This will work, but it does have some limitations:

1. This method works for most vendors, but may not work for those vendors with server-side complex scripted sites
2. Users purchasing through this type of payment link are not “cookied”. As a result, you will only receive credit for the sale if the visitor has not previously clicked on somebody else’s affiliate link.

The third question is: Is there a better way to do this?

Yes.

If the vendor gets a copy of CBMultiLink, they can set up as many different landing pages (including product-specific pages) as they want, all of which affiliates can directly link to. Moreover, the vendor could even offer branded pages for their top affiliates, or allow his affiliates to host their own pitch pages.

Using CBMultiLink in this way, will also solve the two issues with the affiliate_vendor type payment links:

1. This method can be made to work for all vendors, even those with complex scripted sites.
2. Users will always be “cookied”. That means you will receive affiliate credit for the sale, regardless of whether the visitor has previously clicked on somebody else’s affiliate link.

• ClickBank Advice for Affiliates & Vendors - from the ClickBank King!
• ClickBank Payment Button Graphics
• ClickBank Vendor Graphics - Turbo-charge your sales letters and pitch pages
• Why you need to secure your ClickBank Thank You Page
• Multiple Landing Pages for ClickBank Vendors
• The Ultimate Ad Tracker - tracking ads, banners, website visitors, conversion rates, and more
• Using Social Proof to Increase ClickBank Sales

• ClickBank Advice for Affiliates & Vendors - from the ClickBank King!
• What happened to the ClickBank Marketplace? ClickBank hid it, but you can still put it on your site with CBRocket 4.00
• Free Link Cloaker Script
• The Ultimate Ad Tracker - tracking ads, banners, website visitors, conversion rates, and more

Disclosure: Our company is a ClickBank vendor and affiliate. We may earn a commission if you buy one of the products mentioned in this blog post, or if you join ClickBank as a vendor.

Earlier this month, an important anniversary passed, which I had previous failed to mention…. it is 15 years (or was on March 3rd) since we joined ClickBank. I have to say, in retrospect that it was a great decision… as we’ve made quite a bit of money as both a vendor (selling our own products) and affiliate (earning commission by promoting others products).

Here’s a review of the ClickBank affiliate program that I wrote about 9 (!) years ago. ClickBank has improved and upgraded many features since that time, as well as added new types of membership options, but if you join under the option “ClickBank for Affiliates”, it’s still fundamentally the same (hint: click the option “I have an established audience” under “Affiliates” on the ClickBank sign-up page to go directly to this option.

• ClickBank Advice for Affiliates & Vendors - from the ClickBank King!
• ClickBank Payment Button Graphics
• ClickBank Vendor Graphics - Turbo-charge your sales letters and pitch pages
• Why you need to secure your ClickBank Thank You Page
• Multiple Landing Pages for ClickBank Vendors
• The Ultimate Ad Tracker - tracking ads, banners, website visitors, conversion rates, and more
• Using Social Proof to Increase ClickBank Sales

• ClickBank Advice for Affiliates & Vendors - from the ClickBank King!
• What happened to the ClickBank Marketplace? ClickBank hid it, but you can still put it on your site with CBRocket 4.00
• Free Link Cloaker Script
• The Ultimate Ad Tracker - tracking ads, banners, website visitors, conversion rates, and more

Disclosure: Our company is a ClickBank vendor and affiliate. We may earn a commission if you buy one of the products mentioned in this blog post, or if you join ClickBank as a vendor.

We’ve released a new version of CBMultiLink, our tool (PHP script) for ClickBank vendors.

The main purpose of CBMultiLink is it easily allows vendors to offer their affiliates a choice of multiple landing pages to link to, while still earning credit for sales they generate (by default ClickBank only allows vendors to only give their affiliates a single landing page).

Here are some uses of CBMultiLink:

• If a vendor offers multiple products, affiliates can link directly to the particular product’s page for the product they are promoting.
• If a vendor has a product that appeals to different audiences, they can give their affiliates a choice of audience-specific landing pages to link to. For example, if a vendor is selling a weight loss product, they might have different pages aimed at men or women.
• In one recent case, a ClickBank vendor had a landing page with a pop-up. The pop-up was actually highly effective in helping generating sales, so it was obviously best to keep it there for most affiliates. However, some affiliates wanted to advertise the product using a pay-per-click search engine which didn’t allow linking to pages with pop-ups - the solution: use CBMultiLink to give affiliates the choice of 2 landing pages - one with a pop-up, and one without.

CBMultiLink is easy-to-install and use, and allows an unlimited number of landing pages. It also includes a link generator for affiliates to use, and supports ClickBank tid’s (tracking ids) unlike some of its competitors.

This last feature is one of the reasons for the upgrade: we have had customers approach us who wanted to upgrade from one of one competitor’s scripts, including one called “LaunchPad”, because apparently LaunchPad doesn’t support tid’s. The newest version of CBMultiLink makes this easy: As long as you set the landing page ids in CBMultiLink to match the “offer ids” that you were previously using in LaunchPad, all existing LaunchPad affiliate links will continue to work - plus you can use the extra CBMultiLink features (like support for tid’s) as well.

Please contact us if you have questions, or visit the CBMultiLink page and watch the video to find out what CBMultiLink can do, and how easy it is to use.

• ClickBank Advice for Affiliates & Vendors - from the ClickBank King!
• ClickBank Payment Button Graphics
• ClickBank Vendor Graphics - Turbo-charge your sales letters and pitch pages
• Why you need to secure your ClickBank Thank You Page
• Multiple Landing Pages for ClickBank Vendors
• The Ultimate Ad Tracker - tracking ads, banners, website visitors, conversion rates, and more
• Using Social Proof to Increase ClickBank Sales

• ClickBank Advice for Affiliates & Vendors - from the ClickBank King!
• What happened to the ClickBank Marketplace? ClickBank hid it, but you can still put it on your site with CBRocket 4.00
• Free Link Cloaker Script
• The Ultimate Ad Tracker - tracking ads, banners, website visitors, conversion rates, and more

Today, I visited investorsvillage.com, which is one of my favorite sites about stocks and investing, and found this:

What happened?

In 2013, a new Registrar Accreditation agreement was introduced, and domain name registrars are gradually switching over to this new agreement (they are required to if they wish to offer the new domain extensions for example). Under this new agreement, domain name registrars are required to verify the domain name owner’s contact details, and suspend the domain name if they are unable to do so.

Most registrars have interpreted this new requirement as follows: Send a confirmation email to the domain owner, and require them to click a link (or take some other action) when they receive this email. There can of course be differences in interpretation - for example, do they need to send an email per domain, or per account holder? When is the email sent? How long does the recipient have to respond?

In any case, a new problem that domain owners now face is that they must be on the look-out for these emails, because if they miss one, or gets in their spam folder, or otherwise fail to respond, then their domain will be suspended. This seems to have happened to investorsvillage.com, it previously happened to fixtures365.com (a well-known sports betting site), and sooner or later is bound to happen to one of the top internet properties.

We’re pleased to announce an update to our PHP Email Forms Script. This script allows you to collect feedback or other information from visitors to your site, and receive that information by email. The new version, 4.00, of the script is now compatible with cloud-based web hosting as well as traditional web hosts, plus adds many new features.

Key features of our email forms script include:

• You can have an unlimited number of different forms
• You can have an unlimited number of fields on your forms
• The fields on your forms can include cool interactive validation
• You can customize numerous features, including where emails are sent from/to, the subject line of emails sent by the form, the content and lay out of emails sent to your, the reply-to address used for forms process, the web page users are sent to after submitting the form, etc.

Here’s a demonstration form processed using our software - try entering an invalid phone number or email address and see what happens!

There is a lot of media hype about Bitcoin, a type of peer-to-peer virtual currency at the moment.

Most of this hype has been driven by the fact that the market price for Bitcoins has risen from about $10 to about $1,000 in about the last year (or is it the hype which has caused the price rise?). Some people have made a lot of money during this price rise, and although there have been a few serious hiccups during the price rise - some people think there is potential from making more money by speculating Bitcoin will rise further still.

I don’t think that I have nearly enough information to give an opinion about whether Bitcoin’s price will rise further, but I am going to make a prediction about Bitcoin’s future - one that Bitcoin fans aren’t going to like - I believe that a hard-crash is pretty much inevitable. In the past, during its rise in price, Bitcoin’s had some incredible price crashes - down by 30% or 50% in a day - but I’m talking about a price crash back down to virtually zero per coin.

First off though, I can clearly see that there is a significant innovation in the design of Bitcoin - one that many of Bitcoin’s critics fail to recognize. Bitcoin is the first peer-to-peer system for managing relationships of trust between multiple parties - this is the part of Bitcoin’s design that acts as a distributed ledger keeping track of everybody’s Bitcoins, and not allowing any party to cheat. (Previously attempts at digital currencies required one trusted party to act as a banker).

Peer-to-peer systems for managing a relationships of trust could well be economically important - and I think they almost certainly will be economically important to some extent (although I don’t know whether they will be a small niche or a huge) - but that actually has virtually nothing to do with with whether the “coins” used in Bitcoin’s network have any real value.

The fact is Bitcoin has no exclusive ownership of the peer-to-peer network of trust idea, and anybody can use the same idea to setup their own similar network for any purpose - whether it it be a digital currency (known as a “crypto-currency”) or anything else they might want. In fact, dozens, if not hundreds, of other groups already have already set up their own rival crypto currencies based on this same idea - and of course each of these other groups, have their own types of digital coins.

In summary, digital coins aren’t valuable, because there is no real barrier to entry to creating or “finding” as many as you want.

To give an analogy, if somebody in the 70s had said “this silicon chip thing looks like a valuable innovation”, then of course they would have been right. But if they had then gone out and bought as much silicon as they can, expecting it to appreciate in long-term value - they would have fundamentally missed the point. Sand (silicon oxide) didn’t become more valuable as a result of the rise of the computer industry - because we could easily dig more sand up from the ground whenever needed.

Likewise crypto-coins aren’t in my opinion going to get more valuable even if the peer-to-peer networks of trust become a really important industry. The fact is that we can always create more crypto-coins whenever needed (yes the other coins won’t be Bitcoins, but I doubt that matters in the long run, as they are perfectly good substitutes - being able to perform the same function but more cheaply).

Bitcoin’s price rise reminds me of beanie babies. Back then there were people saying “but they are only going to make 10,000 purple pandas^*“, just like there are people today saying “they are only going to make 21 million Bitcoins”. The purple pandas went down in value, because everybody apart from beanie baby speculators realised that other brands of cuddly toy were perfectly good and much cheaper substitutes for purple panda beanie babies - and they had a very strong economic incentive to look for substitutes once speculators had driven the beanie baby price up to stupid levels.

Likewise, people who really want to use crypto-currencies (rather than speculate on them), have a strong economic incentive to find a substitute to Bitcoins, now that the price has been driven so high by speculation. And so I predict like beanie babies, and other markets before them, Bitcoin speculators will find out that the prices driven high by pure speculation, can crash to virtually zero at any time.

Of course, none of the above is meant to imply that some people won’t make a lot of money speculating on Bitcoins - I’m sure many will, by entering and leaving the market at the right time….

…This article is just my personal opinion, not intended as investment advice of any form - but if you disagree (or agree and have something interesting to say), please post a comment!