Brandon Adcock dot comMy Thoughts, Mostly on Direct Response Marketing

A couple days ago I did a podcast interview with Andrew Wee for his blog.  It is fairly long, like 45 minutes, but it goes over how I got my start, what I did before AM, how I work on campaigns, platforms I use, compliance, etc.  Hopefully someone will find it useful.

You can listen to the interview here.

I had a friend tell me not to post this because it was “too useful”, but I figured I would post it anyway.  Everyone needs a useful tip every now and then right?

One thing that most affiliates don’t do is manage the country redirects to offers on their side.  They rely on the network to redirect the traffic or they create seperate pages for different countries.  While this is an ok solution, it isn’t the best.  Often times people will be traveling abroad and want to buy, but are sent to the wrong offer because if their IP address.  Or sometimes affiliates aren’t monetizing international traffic at all.

Here is what I do to monetize international traffic:

I downloaded an geoip script from here off GeoPlugin.com.  I unzipped the script into a folder called “geo”.  This file will basically capture the users IP address and cross reference it to a database to determine what country they are then.

After this is done, I setup my redirects for the affiliate offers.  So your redirects would now look like:

<?php
// ccr.php - country code redirect
require_once(’/geo/geoplugin.class.php’);
$geoplugin = new geoPlugin();
$geoplugin->locate();
$country_code = $geoplugin->countryCode;

switch($country_code) {
case ‘US’:
header(’Location: http://www.yourdomain.com/usoffer.php’);
exit;
case ‘CA’:
header(’Location: http://www.yourdomain.com/caoffer.php’);
exit;
case ‘GB’:
header(’Location: http://www.yourdomain.com/gboffer.php’);
exit;
case ‘IE’:
header(’Location: http://www.yourdomain.com/irelandoffer.php’);
exit;
case ‘AU’:
header(’Location: http://www.yourdomain.com/australiaoffer.php’);
exit;
case ‘NZ’:
header(’Location: http://www.yourdomain.com/newzealandoffer.php’);
exit;
default: // exceptions
header(’Location: http://www.yourdomain.com/allelseoffer.php’);
exit;
}

?>

Basically what this redirect does is check the users IP, determines their country, then sends them to the appropriate redirect based on where you specified people from their country to go to.  By doing this, I can control which offer people from which country go to.  So if a top converting offer only takes US traffic, then I send the US people to that offer, then find the best CA offer and send CA traffic to it, and so on.  As you can see in the script, I identify specific countries which I receive the most traffic from, then I use a final “catch all” redirect which I send users to if an offer accepts “any country”.

By using a method like this, you will prevent more broken links when a user can’t access an offer, you have more control over where users go, you will effectively monetize more users, and make more money.  Hope this helps.