The Firebox Affiliate Blog

What's In My Toolbox

I thought it would be useful for me to share the tools (most free, some with a small charge) that I use on a daily basis when doing online marketing stuff. Most of these will be familiar to people, but I think new affiliates and affiliate managers will benefit from having a list for reference.

SEO and PPC

SEOMoz is a suite of tools invaluable for SEO. It allows you to build a backlink list from competitors easily, see how sites are ranking etc.

Revenuewire Keyword Manager is great for building lists of keywords. You can rearrange them, wrap them in tags for importing, combine different words in different combinations.

Adwords Editor allows you to bulk edit Google campaigns

Google Insights for Search is great for researching keywords.

Affiliates

The http headers plugin for Firefox allows you to decode any link. So you can see if it's an affiliate link, and the cookies set enables you to indentify the affiliate. There's nowhere to hide!

General

URL encode and decode tool. This takes a url string with random characters in it and turns it back into a normal link. If you've copied a link from a Google ad this will help you see it properly.

Feed validator for Atom and RSS. Put in the url of an RSS feed and this will tell you if it's valid code, and what you should change.

XML validator. Like the above, but for xml feeds.

Firefox plugin for html validator. Like the above validators, but as a plugin.

Random Number Generator. Run competitions? This generates truly random numbers allowing you to pick winners fairly.

HTML

Real-time HTML editor. Check code here before you use it. Allows you to play around without saving code.

HTML Code tutorial. Handy reference guide for HTML coding.

HTML Colour Codes. A list of colour references for HTML.

Finance

VAT Calculator. Calculates pricing with and without VAT

HM Revenue and Customs historic exchange rates. If you paid euros for something 6 months ago, work out what it actually cost.

Echange rate. Up to date currency converter.

Social Media

Tweetdeck. Easy to use twitter tool. Very useful if you're monitoring multiple accounts, you can setup columns for different searches.

Video

VLC will play pretty much any file, even those that stump windows media player.

Got any tools you use yourself on a regular basis? (preferably free ones!) I'd love to hear about them.

Thanks

Naomi

How 2: keep up with what's new and hot at Firebox

Its difficult keeping up with new product releases etc, when you don't want to be constantly checking e-mails from merchants.

Here at Firebox there are a couple of tools and links that can help you generate lists of what's new, selling well, and exclusive at Firebox.....

How 2: create deeplinks to Firebox pages

I'm going to start writing some basic guides for both our affiliates and interested merchants, and have decided to tag them all 'How 2' after the tv show. Just because I can.

First up, a guide to deeplinking to Firebox, something I get asked about all the time by new affiliates.

How 2: have a wider sized range of banners available without going nuts

I’ve been following with interest this post on Kieron Donoghue’s blog about merchants providing creative in a wide variety of sizes

I felt inspired to write a post about it (its been a while), not because I disagree with Kieron, but because a lot of the comments have mentioned the problems merchants have in keeping a large variety of banners up to date. It’s caused some pretty heated debate!

For a lot of small to medium sized merchants affiliate marketing is the only form of banner advertising they do, so they don’t have access to lots of resources such as ad agencies or designers. When merchants join a network they are normally advised to create banners in ‘as wide a variety of sizes as possible’ and are shown the standard IAB list of ad sizes. This can seem like an impossible task, but there are ways you can get a variety of ad sizes without producing every advert in every size, and without constantly having to update your entire stock of creative.

Here are my tips: