If you're doing any PPC affiliate marketing, chances are you've heard what's been going on these last 3 days...

Google just completed another round of banning PPC affiliates, providing no information on the cause, other than a canned email.

Unlike a "Google Slap" which is a temporary increase of bid-prices due to low quality-scores, a "Google Ban" is permanent and prevents you from ever advertising on Google using your credit-cards or ip-addresses that you previously used with Google.

We've heard from hundreds of PPC affiliates who got banned on this recent round. Search Engine Marketing forums are exploding with angry marketers who've lost their entire business over-night.


Is affiliate marketing on Google Adwords dying a slow death? This remains to be seen.

The recent ban wasn't limited to affiliates running rebill offers but rather a mix of accounts promoting anything from Clickbank products, CPA offers, poor landing pages, etc.

If you're a PPC marketer, you're going to be forced to evolve or close shop.

Remember this -

Google accounts for about 15% of the traffic available online.

Look into other avenues such as Email Marketing, PPC on other engines such as Yahoo and MSN, Media buys, Product launches and Social media marketing, as a way of driving traffic to your offers.

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This post will walk you through the process of installing PHP 5.2.11 to run under NGinx using PHP-FPM.

NGinx doesn't have built-in support for running PHP, it uses a third-party daemon to spawn instances of php-cgi and then communicates with those instances over sockets.

PHP-FPM is a replacement for spawn-cgi. Runs faster and is more reliable.

Step 1: Download PHP 5.2.11 and apply PHP-FPM patch


Step 2: Configure PHP


Step 3: Install


Step 4: Start PHP-FPM

PHP ChartDirector is a powerful PHP extension that allows to generate very complex charts. You can visit their Web site here.

This tutorial will show you how to install it under FreeBSD.

1. Download PHP ChartDirector

The download page is located here -
http://www.advsofteng.com/download.html

Make sure you pick the FreeBSD version for PHP, and make sure you choose the good version between 32 and 64-bit. At the time of writing this post, the latest 32-bit version available for FreeBSD was this one -
http://download2.advsofteng.com/char...freebsd.tar.gz

Now that you have the download link, the first thing to do is to find out where is your PHP extensions directory. You can find it by checking at phpinfo()'s output or in your php.ini file (which is usually located in /usr/local/lib/php.ini). Just search for "extension_dir" in php.ini - you will find it right away. In our case, our extensions directory was "/usr/local/lib/php/extensions/current". We can now download and extract ChartDirector...


When extracting ChartDirector, it creates a "ChartDirector" folder that contains these files/folders:


We are mainly interested by the "lib" directory. Let's copy the files that we need...


You can get rid of these 2 PHP files:


2. Determine the right version

To determine the right version of the DLL that you must use, refer to this page -
http://www.advsofteng.com/doc/cdphpdoc/phpinstall.htm

For example, if you have PHP 4.4.9, you will use this one -
PHP Version 4.2.1 and above: phpchartdir421.dll

Even if it's FreeBSD and not Windows, you are going to specify a DLL as the extension in your php.ini file. You can delete all the others DLL's that you are not using, but make sure you keep the "fonts" folder and the "libchardir.so" file - they are required. So your extensions directory might look like this:


3. Configure the extension in php.ini

Now that we have all we need, we're going to configure php.ini to add the PHP ChartDirector extension.

Open your php.ini and add a line like this one in the extensions section:


Make sure you use the right DLL for your PHP version. Save your php.ini file and restart your PHP engine and/or Web server (Apache, FastCGI, etc.) to reload your PHP configuration.

To test PHP ChartDirector, you can use the "phpdemo" directory that you can find in the PHP ChartDirector archive. Just copy the folder in the root of your Web server and point it with your browser (ex: http://yourWebAddress/phpdemo). This demo is also very convenient for charts examples.

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This nifty one-liner will count the number of unique visitors in an NGinx web-server access.log file, for a given day:


Replace 04/Nov/2009 with the date you'd like to count the number of unique visitors for.

When installing a FreeBSD system, you're asked if you would like to install the Ports Collection. If you chose no, you can follow these instructions to obtain the ports collection:

Option 1 - CVSup


Option 2 - Portsnap

A lead opt-in web form is a short form, asking the user to provide name, emailaddress, phone and/or other optional fields, for the purpose of signing up for a program, or receiving more information about your offering.



Unlike other shopping carts, the SPI cart doesn't limit you to a single form style or any specific fields.

You can create whatever html form you like, using any design and combination of fields (text, radio button, checkboxes, textareas) as needed.

The only requirement is to have at least the emailaddress field, whenever saving a new lead to the database.

Step 1 - Design your opt-in form

Use your favorite HTML editor to design your lead opt-in form.

For simplicity, use 'name' as the fieldname for the user's name (or 'first_name' + 'last_name'), use 'emailaddress' as the fieldname for the user's email address and use 'phone' as the fieldname for the user's phone number.

Here's a typical lead opt-in form with the basic name,emailaddress,phone fields as well as a few additional custom ones:


Step 2 - Add custom fields to Leads table

Since we're using a few custom fields in this example (traded_indi_stock, traded_option), we need to add those fields to the 'leads' table.

Connect to your SPI database using PHPMyAdmin, locate the leads table and add the two new fields. You only have to do this once every time you're adding a new custom field to a table.



Make sure you're adding the custom fields to the 'leads' table and pay close attention to the fieldnames. The fieldnames you choose are going to have to match the fieldnames you pass to the do_addlead() function.

Step 3 - Save the lead to the database

Now that we have the custom leads in the 'leads' table, saving the lead to the database is the easy part.

The code below renders the opt-in form, saves the lead to the database and redirects the user to a thankyou.html page.


Note about Affiliate Tracking

Often times, affiliates will be sending their traffic to your lead opt-in forms. You're going to want to know which affiliate generated which leads.

Luckily the system takes care of this automatically.

One of the fields in the 'leads' table is aff_id. This is the ID of the referring affiliate and serves as the glue, associating leads with the affiliates who referred them.

When a user clicks on an affiliate link to visit the opt-in form on your website, they typically follow a link that looks like this:

www.YourDomain.com/?aff_id=1234

Where 1234 is the affiliate ID.

As soon as the user lands on the lead opt-in form, the spicart.php include at the top of your file, identifies the aff_id url-parameter and saves it in a cookie on the end-user's machine.

Later when you call do_addlead(), this method picks up the aff_id from the end-user's cookie and passes it along, so that when the lead is added, the referring aff_id is saved as well.