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CBRocket is our PHP script that allows webmasters to allow their visitors to search ClickBank without leaving their site. And set up targeted text ads. A new release, version 2.10, fixes the limitation that had recently appeared, and which I wrote about in a recent blog post. As well as fixing this limitation, we’ve taken the opportunity to add a neat new filter feature, which is explained below. If you want to upgrade to the new version, we’ll provide it free to existing customers - so please contact us including the receipt number of your original purchase.

CBRocket: Filtering the ClickBank marketplace

CBRocket also now includes a feature that allows you to filter out product listings from ClickBank’s results, based on keywords that you specify.

Why would you want to do that?

Although ClickBank contains many excellent products, there may be some products that you feel are inappropriate for your site.

For example:

• There might be some products that you consider unsuitable for your audience. For example, in site that is principally aimed at families,
  you might not wish to list products relating to nude photography, or improving your casino and gambling skills.

• Many affiliate programs and advertising programs have restrictions on what type of content may appear on the same site as their ads. For
  example, you may not be allowed to put gambling ads on your web site. For this reason, you wouldn’t want CBRocket to display ClickBank products
  related to gambling, betting, casinos, poker, roulette, etc.

So how does this feature work?

First you set up a list of keywords describing products that you wish to filter out. And, from then on, whenever you retrieve the last ClickBank
data (by clicking a link in the admin screen of CBRocket), any products which contain any of these keywords will be automatically removed from your copy of the ClickBank marketplace.

Example: if you set this parameter to "casino,roulette,poker,horse racing,bet,bets,betting,gambling" it would filter out any ClickBank products which contained any of these gambling terms in their title or description.

If you ever want to narrow or widen the criteria, you can simply change the list of keywords, and click the retrieval link (in the CBRocket admin
screen) to update your copy of the ClickBank marketplace. It really is that easy.

CBRocket is our PHP script that lets your web site visitors to search ClickBank without leaving their site. And set up targeted text ads. And all the links to the various ClickBank products, in both cases, are tagged with your clickbank affiliate ID, allowing you to earn commissions on sales.

A customer wrote to me recently with a limitation that has just arisen (because of recent changes at ClickBank’s site), and my testing has now confirmed it. When you log-in and ask CBRocket to retrieve the latest Clickbank marketplace data, CBRocket seems to only be retrieving the first 100 listings from each subcategory (subcategories are things like “Marketing -> Promotion”). This sounds like perhaps CBRocket may be leaving out a significant chunk of the ClickBank marketplace - but as always with computers - things are never quite as simple as they first seem.

• When I just tried CBRocket on the marketplace, it did retrieve 5729 unique items, plus a further 1916 duplicates. I don’t yet know the number that should have been retrieved, but it does not sound like a vast number of items have gone missing.
• Many subcategories contain less than 100 items - items in these subcategories won’t be affected at all.
• For those subcategories which contain over 100 items, items 101 onwards are often duplicated in other subcategories which do contain less than 100 items. So, these types of items also won’t be "lost" either.

By "lost", I mean that CBRocket is not retrieving these items from the ClickBank marketplace to its database, and hence these items won’t be displayed in ads or search results (although of course other items would be). At this exact moment, I can’t say that no items are being "lost", but neither can I yet say that any items are actually being "lost". I simply don’t know yet - although my gut tells me that the chances are, a few items are being "lost".

Anyway, I’ve examined the problem, and it should be fairly straightforward to fix. We expect to have an update to CBRocket within a week or so. Check here for updates, and don’t be afraid to email us if you have any questions.

Update:

I’ve done some more testing. It does seem a fair number of lower ranked items are affected - I guess the ClickBank marketplace had grown even faster than I realized. According to my data, there are now 8365 unique items in the marketplace, plus a further 3641 duplicates - which means that 2636 lower ranked items are currently not being retrieved. This would correspond to items which rank below 100 in all the subcategories in which they are listed.

Anyway, the good news, is the planned fix appears to work fine - so we should hopefully (fingers crossed) being able to release a fix within 1 week, and perhaps a bit sooner.

Courtesy of Gábor Kisfaludi, we now have a Hungarian translation of Activ E-Book Compiler, allowing you to create eBooks with Hungarian menus, dialogs, etc. For more information, and download instructions (yes it’s free), please click here.

Here is the full list of translations now available: Danish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish Castellano.

Update: I accidentally had Gábor’s first and last names reversed - sorry Gábor - just updated this article.

A new version of CBRocket - our script for displaying ClickBank search results, and ClickBank ads on your site, has been released. The new release works with the latest version of the ClickBank site.

The new version is 2.02 (not 2.01 as previously mentioned), and is available free to customers who previously purchased CBRocket. Please contact us if you need download instructions.

ClickBank have changed (in the last day or so) something in their site which has broken CBRocket 2.00 - our script for displaying ClickBank search results, and ClickBank ads on your site. The good news is that we already have a fix.

The symptom of the problem is:

1. You log into the Admin screen
2. You click the link "Grab Data from MarketingRocket + ClickBank"
3. The MarketingRocket items are retrieved, but you get 0 items back from ClickBank.

We will release a new version of CBRocket (2.01) that incorporates the fix ASAP, but as the fix is trivial (if you edited a PHP file before), more advanced users can implement the fix themselves.

Here are the instructions.

1. Open cfutil.inc.php in a plain text editor (Notepad, EDIT or similar)
2. Scroll down to line 1774.
3. Lines 1774 to 1775 read :-

   /* New URLs for redesigned clickbank site */
        $url = ‘http://www.clickbank.com/marketplace.html?method=Sort&s= [..etc.. - sorry I left out the end of line from the blog, because there is no space to fit it all in]

4. Change line 1775 to read (what I have done is removed the lower case L from the word html. In other words, the bit that read marketplace.html?method=, is edited into marketplace.htm?method=)

        $url = ‘http://www.clickbank.com/marketplace.htm?method=Sort&s= [..etc.. - sorry I left out the end of line from the blog, because there is no space to fit it all in]

5. Save the file, close your text editor, and upload the new version of cfutil.inc.php to your web host.

That’s it - really - I’m not kidding - the fix involves deleting a single character.

ClickBank have recently revamped their web site… and I have to say it’s a big improvement on the old version. Unfortunately the changes to ClickBank’s site meant that the old version of CBRocket, our script for displaying ClickBank products on your web site, stopped working. We’ve just released a new version, 2.00, that resolves this problem.

Previous customers with the previous 1.02 version, can download the new version by going to the admin screen in their copy of CBRocket and following the instructions. If you’re a customer but have the 1.00 version, or don’t the script installed on your server at the moment, then email us at webmaster@ebookcompiler.com, including giving us your name and receipt number in the email, and we’ll email you back ASAP with the ZIP of 2.00 version attached.

The latest few days have been pretty hectic, so I must apologize for getting slightly behind with email. If you have sent us email, we will reply - but feel free to send it again if you do have concerns. I intend to finish catching up with the remaining email by the close of business tomorrow, Thursday October 5th. Thanks again for your patience.

Our new company fax number is +44 207 117 3467. If calling from the UK, dial 0207 117 3467.

I will be a little slower than usual in answering email for the next few days - Sunil Tanna. Sorry about that, but I’ll get to emails as quickly as possible. All email that you send will be received and answered as normally, eventually. Thanks in advance for your patience.

We have released version 2.11 of CoverFactory, our software for making 3D images for eBook covers and virtual software boxes. The new version improves the quality at which text added to your cover is displayed.

Existing customers can download and upgrade to the new version free of charge through our download page.

If you’ve haven’t purchased CoverFactory, or have never even tried it, you can download a free trial of the latest version also from the download page.

Enjoy!

CBRocket is our PHP script that allows users to search ClickBank from your site, and also display targeted ClickBank text ads (all tagged with your ClickBank "nickname" - which is their word for Affiliate ID). We’ve just released version 1.02.

Version 1.02 is mainly about fixing some minor bugs and issues with the software, but there a few important additions/improvements too, including:

1. A new feature allows you to configure the script to use any of 4 different methods to retrieve data from ClickBank. For most people this will make no difference - but if you have a web host who runs a hobbled version of PHP which doesn’t allow fopen on remote sites (and there seem to be some around, particularly towards the cheaper end of the market) - then this offers a work round.
2. The script now works if you have PHP’s register_globals turned off. Again, for most people, this isn’t an issue, but again it makes the script compatible with more web hosting companies.
3. The synonymizing (is that a word?) - basically the method the software uses to find matching items in the search results which contain similar (but not identical) keywords has been improved.
4. There are some new options for configuring the ordering of results (like whether to prioritize MarketingRocket products which include images).
5. The Mini-Links and Auto Mini-Links system (targeted text ads) has been considerably improved. You can set-up a series of "default" keywords which are used to find extra text ads, if not enough can be found using the keywords that you set-up for your page (Mini-Links) or have in your page title (Auto Mini-Links). What’s more, you can provide a list of default keywords for the software to select from a random, so the ads tend to vary ("rotate") each time your web page is loaded.
6. The log-in screen for administrators includes the latest news headlines from our company (of course your site visitors would never see these - but it could be useful to you as the operator/administrator of the script)

If you haven’t bought CBRocket before, you’ll get the new version automatically, when you buy the script.

If you bought CBRocket 1.00 (if you’ve bought it prior to 1st December 2005), then we’ll upgrade you to version 1.02 free of charge. To get the upgrade, please email us at webmaster@ebookcompiler.com. To get the upgrade, you must quote your ClickBank receipt number for the CBRocket purchase in the body of your message.