Update: The quality of the embedded video is terrible and I apologize. Here is the direct link to the YouTube video, which should be a little clearer: Prosper202 Tutorial – Adding Custom Traffic Sources

My first post of December has been longer than expected in the making. What was supposed to be a quick post at the beginning of the month, quickly dragged to a few days due to unforeseen server issues with my ISP, as well has having connectivity issues with Comcast.

My Internet came screeching to a halt on Friday and so I decided that while I waited for Comcast to fix the modem issues, I’d do a complete overhaul on my home LAN, getting it up to par with 21st Century technology.

Long story short…I’m back up and can finally get back to posting. So here ya are: A complete icon pack for Prosper202, drag and drop import and you’re done!

Download the included zip from the Winzip icon above and watch the video below if you wanna see me walk you through it how to set it all up.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sDGBQ7LdEY

Favicons for the following traffic sources have been added in this icon pack:

1) Aweber
2) Blogger
3) Craigslist
4) Delicious
5) Digg
6) Ebay
7) Ezine Articles
Feed Burner
9) Flickr
10) GetResponse
11) Google Adsense (content network)
12) Myspace
13) RSS (for links in feeds)
14) StumbleUpon
15) Technorati
16) Torrents (for various bit torrent providers)
17) Twitter
18) Wordpress (for links within Wordpress blog, or hosted)
19) Yahoo Answers
20) YouTube

As a loyal an avid Prosper202 user…I thought in light of the recent news of an exploit found with Prosper202, that I’d post some suggestions on hardening your ever-so-sensitive Prosper202 data. As I am not a programmer, nor a database expert, this won’t be an end-all solution to securing Prosper202. This post is simply a list of “best practices” that I came up with through my own research and testing, and with the help of the Prosper202 forum. Feel free to comment with your own findings or suggestions as I’ll continue to update this post as new protection methods are found.

Without getting into too many of the technical details, last week a security vulnerability in the Zend files (encryption engine) in Prosper202 was exploited. Basically through scouring the search engines for Proser202 footprints, a malicious user was able to find vulnerable installations of Prosper202 and steal sensitive campaign information from a few unlucky targets. Hopefully you weren’t one of them.

Luckily, Wes Mahler and team were fast on the defense and quickly released an update that fixed the vulnerability, as well as ceased using the Zend encryption engine. With release 1.1.2, Prosper202 has officially become open-source, which opens a world of exciting new possibilities (think how Wordpress has exploded).

I am for one excited to see what the affiliate community with come up with. Also, in all likeliness, an open-source version should officially put an end to the paranoia of Wes and his team stealing your keyword data. I know Wes and Steven personally. They’re honest guys. They aren’t stealing your data, and never were. But you can now look through the source code yourself if you’re still an unbeliever.

Moving on to the point of this post, here a just a few of the best practices that I came up with for securing your Prosper202 installation, and hopefully preventing your domain from ever being found by yet another malicious affiliate. (We should be helping each other, not hurting each other) Read the rest of this entry

Unlike search campaigns, campaigns on the content network are fundamentally different in many ways. A lot of new marketers make the fatal mistake of leaving the option in Adwords selected to run their same search campaign on the content network. This is a big no no for many reasons:

1) The adgroup structure for a successful content campaign is very different from search.
2) Keyword matching options in the content network are not used (phrase, exact match have no relevance)
3) Content ads are driven by themes vs search ads that are driven by keyword queries.
4) Keyword insertion (dynamic or static) has no relevance in content ads.
5) Your target audience on the content network is much different (and
much wider) than on search, so therefore a new psychology of ad
writing must be used. Read the rest of this entry