Wise Camel writes about 10 Sales and Marketing Tips he learned from Strippers

Lee Odden publishes the results of a poll about the best keyword research tool.

Eric Enge gives some very valuable information regarding paid links which you should consider in your next paid link campaign

Andy Beard give us a lot of valuable information regarding SEO and wordpress. A must read article.

Today I will try to post a small tutorial on how to create a search engine using Clickbank’s marketplace. For that we will need some basic PhP knowledge, a clickbank account and CBcontextual, a script that has all the technical problems solved for us

The Basics

I am not sure what do you know for all these so let’s start with the basics :

What is Clickbank?

Clickbank is an affiliate network that deals with download products. Download products are anything someone can download, software, ebooks, content, etc. Clickbank is not selling products of their own but instead they work as a middleman between you and thousands of vendors.

The good thing about this company is that they have very high commissions that go up to 75% so it is an affiliate network that really worths to join.

What is CBcontextual?

CBcontextual is a php/mysql script that uses the Clickbank marketplace in order to deliver high targeted contextual advertisements to your web site. So suppose that with this script you can have adsense like ads to your site but those ads pay you commissions up to 75% of each sale you may deliver

Using the CBcontextual script to create our own Clickbank search engine

Creating our search engine using Clickbank products would be really difficult before some time, but thanks to CBcontextual’s API it can be done very easily and fast. So here is how the API works :

The CBcontextual script API

The API can work with 3 formats :

• XML
• text
• PhP

For this tutorial we will use the php method witch is the easiest to use. It simply returns a serialized array with the listings so there is no need for extra parsing.

Creating the seach engine

The first step is to create a form to submit our search criteria :

<form method="post" action="/example.php" >
<input type="text" name="q" value="" />
<input type="submit" value="Search" />
</form>


Then we need some settings regarding our CBcontextual installation. What we need is our username and password (the one you use to check your statistics, and the url of your installation (eg. http://example.com/clickbank)

<?php
$uname = '';//Username in your CBcontextual installation
$pass = '';//Password in your CBcontextual installation
$instURL = 'http://www.example.com/clickbank';//The url path to your CBcontextual installation. No trail slash
$limit = 10;//How many results to display
?>

And now the core code. As you can see working with CBcontextual’s API is very cool because our search engine needs only 8 lines of code to coded


<?php
if ( !empty($_POST['q'])){
$results = unserialize(file_get_contents($instURL.'/api.php?
uname='.$uname.'&pass='.$pass.'
&nr='.$limit.'&type=php&keywords='.$_POST['q']));
if ( !$results )
echo 'No results. Please search again.';
else{
foreach ( $results as $res )
echo '<a href="'.$instURL.'/clk.php?i='.$res['id'].'">'.$res['title'].'</a><br />'.$res['description'].'<br />';
}
}
?>

And that’s all, we are finished If you want to download the full example please click here.

What you see above these lines looks nice, and definitely it does not look like an advertisement, right? Well I am afraid you are wrong because this is a new monetization system created by Voxant and TheNewsRoom network. This new kind of advertising is an extended news publishing network with many good partners like the Associated Press, Reuters, McClatchy-Tribune Information, Agence France-Press, etc. and in my opinion they provide a very fresh way to make more money with your web site.

How it works

The news room provides you with video, text and image creatives. All their content is news, which they have very well categorized (and searchable) in their site. What you have to do is grab the content you like - and it is more relevant with your site’s content - and paste the code in your site.

How do they pay?

This program is CPM so you will get paid for every impression of your site, and their ad rates are $1 - $4 depending on the content type you are using.

When do they pay

According to their FAQs they pay on monthly basis. Lowest payment is set to $50.

My first experience

I am a member for just a little time so I don’t have much to say, but I will post back here whenever I have something more to report on TheNewsRoom. Right now I like their system, which is a little different from a “traditional” CPM network, but you will find easily whatever you need. Something I don’t like is that there is not yet been enabled a reporting console, but according to their FAQs they will add it in the near future. I know that this wont sound very professional but they are a serious company so I wont mind for the moment.

I will have you updated on this one, please share your thoughts with us

Eli offers paid subscriptions

Eli of Bluehat fame is offering access to a SQUIRT an enhanced version of his QUIT tool on a paid basis along with piles of other goodies the catch is it aint cheap at $100/month and the real bad news is there is a waiting list to join but if you want some serious tools it will be worth the money!

Blogstorm causes a storm

UK based Blog Storm have launched their new tool for tracking links to your site with many pundits hailing it as the next big analytics tool. However perhaps more of a storm is their fantastic blog which while young has come up with some amazing posts including to very good Google Analytics posts looking at some of the advance features and how to include tracking software in Flash.

Getting the most from Adsense

Dosh Dosh has a fantastically detailed article on placing Google Adsense units on a site plus explaining the new rules from Google expanding the number of units from 1 to 3, this will make a fair few people happy I’m sure. “The Ultimate Guide to Adsense links unit” a payment blogger recommended read this week.

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Have we missed something fantastic or great then tell us, you never know we may feature it next week

So you want to start your own ppc search engine? A ppc search engine may be a good additional income, and you can easilly add it to an established site, or maybe start a new one just for this.

What do I need to start my own ppc search engine?

Well to start you will need a third party network which will provide you the search results. The business scheme is very easy to understand. They give you an automatically way to fetch results based on the keywords that your visitors use to search your site and they pay you for every click that your users do in those results.

Selecting an advertising network for search results

In the past I have used many networks but the only one that was reliable for me was SearchFeed. So in this tutorial I will help you create a ppc search engine using SearchFeed.

Creating your own PPC search engine with SearchFeed

Before you start you will need an account with SearchFeed. If you don’t, use this link to register one, and then come back for the rest of this tutorial

The basics

Login to your account at SearchFeed, and go to Integration Tools > XML and Text Usage. From there you will see your track identification number (trackID) and your partner identification number (pID). Those are very important as they are used by SearchFeed to assign the clicks to your account.

The script. Time to create our php search engine

The above code is very basic. I suppose that you allready have some PhP knowledge in order to work this out. Of course if you have troubles using it you can allways post a question to a PhP forum

function searchFeedResults($q, $results, $tID, $pID)
{
$res = array();
$url = "http://www.searchfeed.com/rd/feed/TextFeed.jsp";
$url.= "?trackID=".$tID."&excID=&pID=".$pID."&cat=";
$url.= urlencode($_GET['q'])."&nl=";
$url.= $results."&page=1&ip=".$_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"];
$ret=file($url);
if ( count($ret) == 0 ) return $res;
for ( $i=0;$i {
$j = $i;
for ( $j=$i;$j<($i+4);$j++)
{
$a = explode('|',$ret[$j]);
$tmp[] = $a[2];
}
$res [] = $tmp;
unset($tmp);
}
return $res;
}

This function (searchFeedResults) gets the results and returns an array with them. The parameters are :

• $q => The query (search terms)
• $results => How many results to display
• $tID => Your SearchFeed track id
• $pID => Your SearchFeed partner id

How to use the script

Here is a common usage of the script. I suppose that the user is using $_GET[’q'] to send a query. So here is how we can parse it:

$results = searchFeedResults($_GET['q'], 20, $myTid, $myPid);
if ( $results ){
foreach ( $results as $rec ){
echo '
<p>
<a href="'.$rec[2].'" onmouseover="window.status=\'http://'.$rec[1].'\'; return true"
onmouseout="window.status=\' \'; return true">'.$rec[0].'</a><br />
'.$rec[3].'<br />
<small>'.$rec[1].'</small>
</p>';
}
}else{
echo 'No results for '.$_GET['q'].'<br /><br />';
}

Conclusions

Hope you like our script. By the way I have also added a full working script, which you can download here.