How I promoted tens of thousands of affiliate programs simultaneous (22)

I will tell you my story how i ran tens of thousands of affiliate programs at the same time.

I already posted the first part on my blog but of course I will post it here as well.

It all started pretty slow and when I started the stuff I didn´t expect myself that it would become that big.

I will split the story in several parts because I also need to think about how and what exacty I did, the whole fun started in 2009 already so my forgetful brain needs some time to remember all details.

The funny thing is although I can´t count how many programs and campaigns I ran in all the time I didn´t really had to work hard for it.

A big part of the stuff ran on it´s own and I only had to collect the money.

I made high 6 figures in profit from it with really not much work involved.

Could I have made more? Sure
Would I had to work more? Sure

And as the lazy guy I am I rather take the easy and lazy money and enjoy my life instead of working more.

Ok, let´s start with Affiliate Program Overkill Part 1: The Cloaker

The first step in the whole process was how I coded my own cloaker.

In 2009 I got an account at a trafficsource closed.

“Due to deceptive practices your ads have been disapproved and your account has been terminated. “

Their explanation was “The ad originally approved is no longer displaying”.

Well, I was splittesting different landing pages so of course it can happen that the lander shown later is not the one shown when I created the campaign.

But it´s not deceptive at all.

Anyway, I was pretty much pissed so I decided to find a workaround for it to prevent that such stuff happens in the future again.

At this point I decided to code a cloaker.

The funny thing is, at that time I didn´t even knew that this is called “cloaker”.
I also had absolutely ZERO knowledge of PHP or so, I just wanted to code a script or software that prevents me from getting into trouble for running normal campaigns.

I did some brainstorming and pretty fast it was clear for me that I need to find a way to redirect the reviewers from the trafficsource to somewhere else.

Then I started to do some research and collected ideas what I need to do.

Google, Stackoverflow and many small snippets from many other websites helped me to work on my project.

The cloaker is completely in PHP and the first versions were pretty basic but still did the job.

At first I only tracked IP addresses and put them on a blacklist and redirected all users with such IP addresses to a whitehat lander.

The longer I kept it running the better it worked because I had more and more data to analyse.

Then I tried to track everything from IPs, IP Ranges, ISP, locations, User Agents, technical data of the devices and much more.

I started to work with blacklists and whitelists.

I didn´t know how to create SQL databases so I had the script to write all values in CSV files that I then checked later and all values that I needed in the cloaker I put directly into the PHP file in arrays.

The whole cloaker basically is a PHP script with many different if/else statements going through them one after another.

When a condition was matched the user got redirected to wherever I wanted.

Only when a user went successful through all tests he got redirected to my real campaign.

It was by far not the best way to do it but I am also no coder at all and for me the only important thing was that it worked.

The script then created different CSV files based on the results, one file for successful users, one file for bad users from a blacklist, one file for new bad users.

A problem was that for each campaign I had to change the cloaker file separately, that was pretty annoying.

Later when I scaled the whole stuff I also worked on a better way to run it, you can read about it in one of the next parts.

Although the cloaker was pretty much customized for my very own needs it worked very good and still works but it´s rather limited to only some of my campaigns where I need it.

Nontheless I probably ran $XXX.XXX of traffic and millions of impressions through the script in all the years from different trafficsources and never had problems anymore and never got an account closed again.

And I ran some really shady and blackhat stuff in all the time.

The cloaker is still working but from 2009 to now the landscape changed and so did my work so I don´t really use it much anymore.

But I still have some campaigns running since 2012 or 2013 where I still use the cloaker but in a more advanced version.

And this is the topic for Part 2: Expanding The Operation

Affiliate Program Overkill Part 2: Scaling The Operation

In the last part I told you how I built my cloaker.

The problem was that the cloaker was still very basic and I had to copy the PHP file with the script into the folder for each campaign separately.
So when I made changes to the script I had to do the changes in all files one by one.

Also the collected data was written in several files in the folders of each campaign.

And these were some files per campaign, I tracked everything separated based on country and known or unknown values, blacklisted or whitelisted traffic.

Probably I am the only person worldwide who is able to understand the whole structure.

Next thing was to fake the referrer, for this I used an early version of the CPA Redirector script and modified it pretty heavy for my own needs.

At this time I was running CPV traffic so each target in my campaigns was a separate URL.

It was all fine so far as long as I only promoted one affiliate program per campaign.

For these campaigns I didn´t use a tracker so A/B tests and stuff didn´t work and I also didn´t need it.

I had the campaigns running for 3 years or so with only with very limited and specific affiliate programs.
I already made 6 figures profit from it but then I had the feeling that it´s time to scale the operation.

The problem was, that the cloaker was only cloaking the traffic and redirecting all traffic to my campaign link.
But now I also wanted to redirect the traffic to different destinations based on the target URL.

And then I did the first big improvement to my scripts which added lots of new functionality.

Additionally I came up with a solution to access the same PHP file from all my campaigns.
When I did changes to the cloaker I only had to do it once and not for each campaign separately.

Also the cloaker now tracked stats for each campaign separated in the campaigns folder.
Additionally it tracked stats in big files for all campaigns together in the split by country and good, bad, unknown.

Everything was prepared and I was ready to run on a bigger scale.

The Improvement

The big improvement I made to the scripts was that now I was able to redirect the traffic to different destinations based on the target URL.

To make that possible I didn’t send the traffic to the cloaker script itself to redirect the users from there.

Instead I created a new script with a very basic database and a very basic interface.
In this script I can create new tables for each campaign and then add the campaign targets together with the appropriate destinations to the database.

I didn’t redirect the traffic from the cloaker script itself anymore.
I came up with a specific file and folder structure for my campaigns.
Now the traffic went through the new script that just included the the cloaker PHP file.

The traffic went through all the checks and depending on the outcome the cloaker set the results to “false” or “true”.

The new script then checked the result and sent the traffic either to a safe site or grabbed the corresponding entry for the target from the database and redirected the user to the destination.

When I think back it´s pretty funny that I really got all that stuff running.
At this time I still never really learned coding or so.
I just had ideas and found smart solutions to get my stuff working.

A code snippet here, a code snippet there, a little bit from this script, a little bit from that.

Was lots of trial and error but important is the end result and it works very good.

To scale the whole stuff I needed more affiliate programs to promote.

Because it would take too much time and work to sign up for many different inhouse programs I rather concentrated on few bigger affiliate networks and promoted many programs from these platforms.

But that were also many affiliate programs per network.

It would take ages to apply for them all one by one and then grab the links and stuff.

I thought about it and then created a bot for each network with Zennoposter.

All it did was to login and check all programs that I want to run.
When I already applied for the program it checked if I am approved or not.
If yes grab the links, if not wait and when I didn´t apply yet the bot did it.

That way I built a good database of programs to promote.

Ok, let´s summarize this part:

Now I had few hundred affiliates programs that I wanted to run.

I also worked on my scripts so that working on the cloaker got a lot easier.
I only had to edit one file when I made chances.

Then I created scripts to redirect users to different destinations based on the targets I bid on.

Additinally I added some security measures to the flow.

The only problem was that faking the referrer and showing individual fake sites for each of the few hundred affiliate programs was next to impossible.

But I already had a plan for it.

In the next part I will tell how I solved the problem to fake referrers and show good fake sites for hundreds and thousands of different affiliate programs.

And I can imagine that at this point probably many of you are wondering what exactly I was doing there.
In the next part I will also try to explain a bit better how the stuff worked and will tell little bit more about the flow the users went through.

Ok, let´s continue with some fun.

Usually in this part I wanted to explain the stuff a bit to make it easier to follow.

I thought when I explain it with some images then probably it´s easier to understand.

Now I see that it probably only visualizes how complicated the shit is.

I want to show it anyway so that you can see what weird stuff sometimes comes up in my mind.

The Beginning


It all started with a banned account at a trafficsource.

To prevent that this happens again I thought about ways to avoid it.

Then I just started to build a cloaker.

It was very basic, pure PHP and with no databases.

In the first version I only used IP addresses, locations and specific URL parameters to check if the traffic is “Good” or “Bad”.

The flow was



The next step was basically the same.

Only difference is that now the cloaker creates CSV files to track many different elements from the traffic.

Starting to track data




The Good.csv file is for whitelisted IPs and ISPs.
The Bad.csv id for blacklisted IPs and ISPs.
The New.csv is for data that is neither in blacklist nor in whitelist.

At this time the problem was that I had to put the cloaker PHP file in every folder for my campaigns separately.
And when I had to change the file I had to do it for all files in all folders one by one.

So the next step was to improve the cloaker so that all campaigns can access the same cloaker PHP file.
That way I only have one file and only need to make changes once.

Now my folder structure was like this

Only one cloaker file




In the main folder was the cloaker file.

Then there were subfolders for each traffic source and in the trafficsource folders were folders for each campaign.

The traffic now wasn´t send to the cloaker file anymore.
Instead it was sent to files in the campaigns folders and these files just included the cloaker.php.

The cloaker then checked the traffic and based on the result it gave a TRUE or FALSE.
When TRUE the traffic got redirected to a safe site, when not TRUE traffic got redirected to affiliate program.

So now the flow was like this



The traffic went to the campaigns where the cloaker was included.

When traffic was safe it got redirected through a fake site where the referrer is changed and then redirected to the affiliate program.

Also now all campaigns tracked the data for good/bad/new traffic in CSV files in the campaign folders.

Additionally the cloaker created CSV files by country in the main folder.

This worked pretty good so far but the problem was that for each campaign I could only promote one affiliate program.

But I wanted to promote more programs in one campaign.

As you can read in the last part, I ran CPV traffic where each target was an URL.
I wanted to redirect specific targets to specific destinations.

For this I created a new script.

Multi Destination Redirect




Now I can redirect each target to separate destinations.

So traffic flow was same as before.
Campaign file included the cloaker and the cloaker checked the traffic and sent result.

But now the campagn file additionally sent the target and the campaign ID from the new script to the site where the referrer gets faked.

Then the fake site can grab the corresponding destination and send the user to the appropriate destinations.

For little bit entertainment here is some code so that you can understand the stuff better.

Coding for nerds

<?php


$keywordholen = strtolower($_GET['keyword']);

$keyword = str_replace('www.', '', $keywordholen);

$kampagne = '123';
$sub_id = 's2';
$trackid = 'abcde';

$useragent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];

include("../../trackall.inc.php");

if ((trackall()===true) {

header('Location: https://safesite.com');
}
 else {

header( 'Location: https://fakesite.com/ ?mn=123456789&keyword='.$keyword.' &kampagne='.$kampagne.'&sub_id='.$sub_id.' &trackid='.$trackid);
}
die;
?>

<?php
// Redirect By SubID

define('CHECK_FOR_TABLES',false);
//require config file with database connection and other basic things
require_once 'config.php';

$kampagne=123;

$subid=$db->real_escape_string($_POST['keyword']);

$res=$db->query('SELECT redirect FROM subids WHERE subid="'.$subid.'" AND campaign_id='.$kampagne);
if ($res->num_rows>0)
{
    $redirect_to=$res->fetch_row();
    $redirect_to=$redirect_to[0];
}
else
{
    //set default redirect
    $redirect_to='safesite.com';
}

 
//Random String

function randomstring($length = 25) {
  // $chars - String aller erlaubten Zahlen
  $chars = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ1234567890";
  // Funktionsstart
  srand((double)microtime()*1000000);
  $i = 0; // Counter auf null
  while ($i < $length) { // Schleife solange $i kleiner $length
    // Holen eines zufälligen Zeichens
    $num = rand() % strlen($chars);
    // Ausführen von substr zum wählen eines Zeichens
    $tmp = substr($chars, $num, 1);
    // Anhängen des Zeichens
    $pass = $pass . $tmp;
    // $i++ um den Counter um eins zu erhöhen
    $i++;
  }
  // Schleife wird beendet und 
  // $pass (Zufallsstring) zurück gegeben
  return $pass;
}
$myrand = randomstring(25);
//CPAR Settings

$magic_number = 123456789; // Any number you choose except ZERO!

//$cpa_offer_url = $redirect_to;

//Don't edit below this line unless you know what you are doing.

if (isset($_GET['mn']) && $_GET['mn']==$magic_number){		

		echo '<html><head></head><body><form action="' . 'http://'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']. $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']."? trackingid=".$myrand . '" method="post" id="form1">

<input type="hidden"  name="mn" value="' . $magic_number . '" />
<input type="hidden" name="keyword" value="'.$_GET['keyword'].'" /></form>

<script language="JavaScript"> 
	document.getElementById(\'form1\'). submit();</script></body></html>';
		return true; 
		exit();
}

if ($_POST['mn']==$magic_number){		

	echo '<html><head></head><body><form action="' . 'http://'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']. $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']."? trackingid=".$myrand . '" method="post" id="form1">

<input type="hidden"  name="mn" value="' . $magic_number . $magic_number . '" />
<input type="hidden" name="keyword" value="'.$_POST['keyword'].'" /></form>

<script language="JavaScript"> 
	document.getElementById(\'form1\'). submit();</script></body></html>';
		return true; 
		exit();
}

$dom = preg_replace( "/^www\./", "", $_SERVER[ 'HTTP_HOST' ] ) ;
$ref= $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];


if (((strpos($ref, $dom)!=FALSE) || (trim($ref)=="" ) )  && ($_POST['mn']==$magic_number.$magic_number)){
		header( 'Location: http://' . $redirect_to);
		exit();
	}

// Whitehat Site

echo "unique tracking id= $myrand<br/>";
echo "written to file";

?>

Alright, let´s get ready for the big final.

Now it gets really crazy.

I had my setup running with few hundred affiliate programs for some time already.
Then I decided to scale it massive.

Of course at this stage I used some tools to make the work a bit easier.

Software used:
Zennoposter – With Zennoposter I created some scrapers and signup/login bots
Winautomation – Winautomation helped me to sort lists and clean my data
Scrapebox – With Scrapebox I got me lots of Google results and also used it to sort data

Ok, here we go

Few hundred affiliate programs were not enough for me.
I wanted to have more.

So at first I prepared a list of affiliate networks with many different affiliate programs.

There I came up with several platforms that gave me altogether more than 10k affiliate programs to promote.

The annoying part was to apply for all the programs if needed and grab all the links.
For this I used Zennoposter again.

I wasn´t picky with the choice of programs that I want to promote.
I only went for pure quantity.
The more – the better.

As I already told in the previous posts, one big problem was to produce “Safe Sites” to show as a referrer for all the programs.

When I only ran it on low scale with very few programs I just created a basic template that I changed for all affiliate programs separately.

But when I started to scale it wasn´t possible anymore.
Or can you imagine to create separate landers for few hundred programs that you run all at the same time.

And now think about thousands of programs.

I already had an idea and contacted my coder.
He understood pretty good what I wanted to archive and coded a platform for me that I then used for this project.

Unluckily I can´t tell too much about it because it´s still in use and for some reasons I better keep it underground

Anyway, this platform was able to show reasonable safe sites for as many programs as I want to.

I run it in few slightly different versions for different languages or verticals.

When my coder sent me the final files the first thing I did was to try to understand the whole structure.
It´s built on Codeigniter so I needed to check how it´s all connected.

As soon as I knew it I had some ideas how to improve the software and started working on it.

Now it´s not only a great platform to use for tens of thousands of affiliate programs.
It grabs parameters from the URL and based on the values it redirects and fakes/hides the referrer.

Then I had another problem.
When I checked my platform on Similarweb I saw that from the referrers you could see the origin of my traffic.
And that was not good.

So far I could only fake the outgoing traffic from my platform to the affiliate programs.
But the incoming traffic also needed to be faked.

As usual I did some brainstorming and came up with a pretty sneaky trick.

I just used Google as referrer.
What could be better than the big G when you want to fake the origin of your traffic and pretend to be high quality.

To do this my website only needed to be indexed by Google.
Then I searched for my website on Google and checked the source code of the search results.
There I had to find the Google redirect link.

That´s the link that opens when you click on a search result.

Sounds complicated?
– Well, maybe it is

I am not sure if the trick is still working nowadays but when I used it it worked.

Now the redirects were like this:

Trafficsource -> Tracking Link -> Redirect through Google to platform -> Fake referrer – Redirect to affiliate program

Alright, one more problem solved so let´s start the fun.

Although I had more than 10k or so affiliate programs to promote they were all from big networks.

I wanted to get inhouse programs as well.

So first thing I did was to create scrapers for Similarweb and Alexa to get me the top sites.

I know that I could just download the sites but with my scrapers I automatically could grab related sites.

Additionally I prepared a list with keywords like “affiliate program”, “partner program”, “partner signup” and so on.
I used Scrapebox as well as an own created Google scraper to search for such keywords.

That way I gathered a really big list of websites.

I cleaned the lists, stripped all entries down to root domain and removed duplicates.

Now I searched for affiliate program software like iDev, Omnistar, Postaffiliate Pro and so on.

I visited some websites that were using these softwares.
In the sourcecode of these websites I searched for footprints.

Then I used Scrapebox to search millions of websites for footprints of the affiliate softwares and saved the results in separate files.

I created bots for all these softwares to sign up, login, check if approved or not and get links.

I ran the bots once a day to check for new approved programs.

The results I saved in new files again.

One file for pending, one for approved and one for bad/not worth it.

The pending sites were checked once a day, the approved were used to login and grab links.

Then I signed up for some affiliate program aggregator platforms and got additional thousands of programs from there as well.

Many of these programs I already had from other platforms so I created scripts with Winautomaiton to compare.

When the program is available on a real network or inhouse already then delete it from the aggregators.
When it´s not available anywhere else keep it.

Next step was to be little bit more niche specific.
I used search terms like “VERTICAL affiliate program” to get as many results as possible for specific verticals.

The results I sorted again, removed duplicates and stuff.

I took the clean results and checke them on Alexa and Similarweb to see if it´s worth it or not.

That way I generated a new list.

Well, all in all I had XX,XXX affiliate programs to promote.

I can´t tell the exact number because it were so many and I just didn´t care about it.

Of course I also had to add the programs to my platform.
I created a bot again, for this task I used Winautomation.

Now you probably ask yourself how I could run these campaigns?
How did I track it?
What was with payments, isn´t it a big mess with so many different programs to work with?

The truth is that I just didn´t care about all these things.

I created very big campaigns for many affiliate programs per campaign.
Sometimes I even had to split campaigns because of trafficsource limits.

Then I just keep it running and didn´t really track anything.

I just check the targets that spend much money.
There I control if they are profitable or not.

The rest I just keep running because the profitable high volume targets make good for all non profitable low volume targets.

When I see that targets spend much money but the connected program is not converting I stop it.

About payments, for most programs I use Paypal and just collect payments.
Other programs, mostly inhouse programs, send checks.

I then just collect some checks and bring them to my bank.
They probably hate me because I am the only person that always brings checks from foreign countries.

Well, now you know my story how I scaled to a really crazy amount of different programs that I ran all at the same time.

I hope you enjoyed it and I didn´t forget anything.
When you have any questions about it feel free to ask.

I can´t go too deep into details for some things because I still have some campaigns running.

Because of changes in the traffic landscape it´s not working as good anymore but it´s still generating some nice money.

In my interview I talked about campaigns that I have running for many years already basically on autopilot.

These are the campaigns, some of them are running since 2013 or so already and I hope that they will live for some more time.

Been looking forward to this! You rock @twinaxe!!



Amy

Sent from my SM-G930W8 using STM Forums mobile app

Inspiring

Ok, let´s continue with PART 2

There it already gets little bit complicated but the fun has just started
The whole stuff is little bit complicated so in the next part I will explain it more in detail that hopefully it´s better to understand before we then check the big final where things went out of control.

Alright, next part is online.

Enjoy the shit

And thanks to Amy, I also reformatted the first two parts for better readability.

Graphics are HIGHLY appreciated! Especially for the technically-challenged like myself.

One question: If someone were to imitate this exact setup now, how well do you think the cloaking setup would work? Have traffic sources gotten too saavy in detecting this type of setup?

Another question: How were you controlling testing costs to make sure they didn't eclipse your profits?

Can't wait to see part 4!


Amy

Sent from my SM-G930W8 using STM Forums mobile app

Push push

The final is HERE

I really enjoyed reading this, although you have to agree 99% of this wouldn't work in 2019.

How much revenue are you doing nowadays?

Originally Posted by 247media

although you have to agree 99% of this wouldn't work in 2019

Originally Posted by 247media

How much revenue are you doing nowadays?

Mind f*ckin blown!

Your process really illustrates the magic of scaling to the extreme.

Now I'm trying to think of ways to apply your method to other models - for example use some type of general ad to test hundreds or thousands of ecom products and just picking the gems to optimize and scale.

Thanks so much for posting my friend!


Amy

Originally Posted by vortex

Now I'm trying to think of ways to apply your method to other models - for example use some type of general ad to test hundreds or thousands of ecom products and just picking the gems to optimize and scale.

if you found out, please let me know

Originally Posted by vortex

Mind f*ckin blown!

Your process really illustrates the magic of scaling to the extreme.

Now I'm trying to think of ways to apply your method to other models - for example use some type of general ad to test hundreds or thousands of ecom products and just picking the gems to optimize and scale.

Thanks so much for posting my friend!


Amy

hey twinaxe, thanks for the awesome post.

As far as using the Google search result to fake the incoming traffic, did you have any issues with Google dropping this result from their index, and the link no longer working etc etc??

I assume there would have been a ton of traffic going through this Google search result, which may have looked suspicious to them or raised a flag?

@mattboy

I also asked myself if it could produce issues or not.

But I never had problems with it, the redirects never got banned, flagged or whatever.

The reason why it´s not working anymore is (as far as I see) that you get a note that the link tries to redirect you.
But I am confident there we could also find a solution

Originally Posted by twinaxe

@mattboy

I also asked myself if it could produce issues or not.

But I never had problems with it, the redirects never got banned, flagged or whatever.

The reason why it´s not working anymore is (as far as I see) that you get a note that the link tries to redirect you.
But I am confident there we could also find a solution

Well, seems your mixing two different things together in your post.

The quote you used is about using Google as a referer and as far as I know this isn´t working anymore.

At least not the way that I used it at this time.

The method itself is still working from a technical point of view, the problem is that there´s not enough volume available anymore.