As I mentioned in my previous Prosper202 tutorial on the “10 Best Practices To Securing Your Prosper202 Installation“, I would eventually post a tutorial on how to get Prosper202 to play nice with an SSL server once I had finished some more testing.

We’ll I think I’ve figured it out.

Word of Caution: Before attempting any of the steps mentioned below, I HIGHLY recommend you setup a 2nd Prosper202 install from which to test on. Do not do this on a production installation.

Why user Prosper202 with SSL?

Without getting into too much of the “techno-babble”, SSL provides your sessions with encryption. This means that when you login to your Prosper202 account, your login information will be encrypted, instead of being sent to the server in clear text.

Also, you’ll have the sneaky advantage of totally blanking out your referrer, bwahahaha.

By default, Prosper202 can cloak your referrer when the cloaking options are turned on, but this still passes the domain of your Prosper202 install to your CPA network. They won’t see your landing pages of course, but they will still be able to see that all the traffic comes from domain “tracking.xyz.com” for example.

When using cloaking in conjunction with HTTPS tracking links, your referrer will be blanked, and your CPA network won’t have any idea where the traffic is coming from. Stealthly eh?

Here’s what you need to do: Read the rest of this entry

If you have a quick read of a post I did back in August called “Content Stuffing Your Landing Pages…“, you’ll learn how to hide content with hidden div tags and css stylings.

Taking that same process a step further, you could do exactly the same thing and hide navigational menus that will help the Google bot spider your site, but at the same time, not give unnecessary links to follow for your real visitors.

Google wants to see links to a terms of service, page contact us, privacy policy. Also, having an xml sitemap, links to other internal pages such, and a few outgoing links to high quality resource sites can all improve your quality score. But depending upon the style of landing page you use, these links can be unsightly and lead to visitor “leakage”. Read the rest of this entry

Lately, I’ve been experimenting a lot with image ad placement campaigns in the content network. I like image campaigns for a couple reasons:

• Image ads of course are more eye catching than text ads
• Using image ads with placement targeting can be very effective
• You can dominate an entire ad region with an image ad
• There is less competition for certain verticals in the content network
• They’re quick & easy to setup
• Google’s quality score works differently than search, making direct linking to the offer a much more viable solution.
• And if you’re lucky enough, the creatives have already been made by the advertiser
  * (the caveat of course is that not all ad formats are available, hence the reason I am writing this post)

Last night though, I had to shoot off an email to my main affiliate networks with a request that I think all affiliates can agree is lacking in the industry. We need compliant creatives in the networks supporting all the available Google image formats! Read the rest of this entry