I have a small update for those who are eagerly waiting for the Affiliate Plugin FREE Traffic Exchange service to be launched. I had a chat with our developers and they informed that it might not be possible to launch the traffic exchange service in October as planned earlier, due to some technical hitches.

 

However they informed that work is going on at full speed and we should be good to go in couple of weeks from now. In any case, traffic exchnage will go live by mid-November. I'll be posting the list of features which our traffic exchange service provide to our users, for FREE ;-)

It's been almost a month since my last blog. We have been quite busy adding new features to the site. I am sure you'll jump from your chair when you'll come to know about the new feature on our site. If it's not clear from the title of the blog then let me formally announce that very soon we are going to lauch FREE traffic exchange service on Affiliate Plugin itself. Initially we though of starting a new site altogether for traffic exchange but later we felt that it would be better to launch the service on Affiliate Plugin itself since we already have the targeted audience right here.

 

I know all affiliate marketes love traffic exchange in any form :-)

In continuation of adding new features to site, we have added a new feature - AffiliatePlugin Marketplace. The idea behind marketplace is to allow publishers to showcase their new products related to Affiliate Marketing, SEO, PPC etc.

However we'll not allow users to post their affiliate links in their listings. We know that some of you are not going to like it but out intention is to make sure users don't spam marketplace with their affiliate links all over. Let's try to make it an informative place where affiliates can find tools, scripts & software which can help them in becoming successful in this competitive affiliate marketing world.

Give it a try and let us know if you have any feedback or suggestions and we'll try our best to incorporate them.

AffiliatePlugin Team

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Recently many reports of Google Adwords accounts being hacked have surfaced. As soon as hackers get into your account, they start their own campaigns and set the CPC to the maximum to ensure their ads appear on top of search results. The campaigns keep running till they catch your attention or when you see your credit card bills. If you fail to notice them on time then it may result in huge losses.  

In one of the recent incident, hacker broke into a Google Adwords account, created a campaign and spent 6100 British Pound within 10 hours on a campaign. In another case, the account holder was a bit lucky, he logged in the account and found one alien campaign running and noticed 80 British Pound had been spent on the campaign with each CPC set to around 3.5 British Pound. It's difficult to say how exactly the Google Adwords accounts are being hacked since there are multiple ways in whihc hackers can break into your account, be it Google Adwords or could be your bank account. Some suggest its being done using some malware, others are suggesting that some programmed links are sent to account holder mail and when user clicks on it, it exposes the account details to hacker(Personally I doubt this one).

It doesn't really matter how these hackers break into our accounts. What is important is that how we can stop or at least minimize such risks. We have come up with a simple checklist using which you can save your Google Adwords account from being hacked.

• Login to your Google Adwords accounts on a daily basis, if possible multiple times a day if you actively use your account. Check for any unsual activity in your account like new campaign which you didn't create, increased/decreased CPC of your own campaigns, wrong destination URLs etc.
• If you are not using your Google Adwords account at present then there are chances you'll not login to your account for many days. In such a case, you better cancel the account or inform Google Adwords support to keep an eye on any activity in your account and ask them for authorization for any new activity in your account.
• Follow some basic password security guidelines. Your password should not contain the user name; it should be minimum 8 characters and should be a combination of alphabets, numbers and at least one special character. It should not be very obvious, should not contain your name. Change the password on a regular basis.
• DO NOT access your Adwords account from public places like cyber cafe or through unsecured Wi-Fi. Always access your account from your home computer or office computer (if you use it dedicatedly)

You'll notice that all above things are quite basic but using these basic steps you can save your Google Adwords account from being hacked. In fact, above steps are not applicable to only your Google Adwords accounts but for your accounts/transactions where you deal with your credit cards, PayPal and bank accounts, like online shopping.

Google launched their own web browser "Chrome" this week. Good part is, its open source like Mozilla Firefox and is very light compared to any other browser. I downloaded it today and gave it a try but i found it very slow, it failed to load most of the sites, even Yahoo. Initially I suspected it might be due to Internet speed but I tried opening all those sites in Firefox and they loaded within seconds(as always) .. I love Firefox ;-)

Anyway, it would be a bit too early to comment on Chrome and I need to use it for a couple of days to find all pros and cons. You can also give it a try ... here is the download link -  Download Google Chrome

Some experts are suggesting that Google has big intentions behind launching their own web browser. They might have some built-in mechanisms which will keep Google informed about your browsing habits, the sites you visit the most, time you spend online, which payment gateways you prefer and the list goes on ... Remember, this data is invaluable for any Internet company and Google is no different. Since Google Chrome is open source so there is no doubt it'll grow mature very fast like Firefox and soon you'll see a very strong developer community working for it and developing numerous extensions for it.

Anyhow you should give Google Chrome a try and do not forgot to send your valuable feedback to us.
 

Based on the suggestions we have received, we are planning to integrate a affiliate programs directory in our website where we'll list the best affiliate programs on the web. Since we are using Joomla for our site, we are in process of looking for a ideal extension to suit this requirement. We have a few options in hand but it would be great if you can suggest some good extensions which can be integrated seamlessly in the site.

 

I know there are already many very good affiliate program directories available but the main idea behind having it in our site is to ensure that our users can find all affiliate marketing resources at one place instead of searching on Internet. We are committed to provide you the best and latest resources from affiliate marketing world at one place.

We are proud to introduce our strategic partner StoreStacker to you. If you have not heard about them there here is the brief introduction and I'm sure affiliate community out there will be very exceited to see their affiliate shop builder product.

 

StoreStacker allows you to build a complete affiliate store on any website or blog, pulling products from ebay, amazon, clickbank, overstock, regnow, etc, literally 'stacking' them into one website.  Product images, descriptions, and prices are all imported, including the users affiliate ID, automatically. 

It's been almost a year since I posted anything on our blog. Removing the forum almost crippled the site and I'll be honest in telling you that we got very negative feedback from the users for this act. I was never happy removing the forum from the site but I had no choice other than stop making the forum home of spammers.

Anyway, that is past and as promised last year we're back with a full fledged affiliate marketing community equipped with forums, blogs, groups and much more. As you can see, the site is under development and has to go through many more improvements but the skeleton is ready.

 I shall be back with news of full fledged news of formal re-launch of Affiliate Plugin - The Largest Affiliate Marketing Community on Internet. I hope we'll keep getting the support from our dear users ...

I am writing this post to make an announcement which is going to hurt me a lot and many of our users also will be shocked by this anouncement :-(

From the topic of the post you must have come to know what this is all about. Just to make it formal, we have removed the forum from our site. The main reason being the spams. It was our mistake not to have security mechanism in place like captcha verifications and the forum we chose for this purpose was not highly secure. Since we provide all information for free and our intention was never to make money from this site, we can't afford to pay for quality forum software like vBulletin. The number of users crossed 500 within a span of 4 months but we realized that almost 70% of the users (~350 users) were spam accounts and were created through automated bots. We sincearly apologize to our 150 genuine users who were actively participating in the forums.

We know there are some very good open source forums available like phpBB, fireboard, SMF etc. Initially we though for phpBB but there are some integration issues with Joomla so dropped the idea. We are planning to re-create the forum in near future and we'll take all security measures this time. Most probably, we'll be using Fireboard but we are waiting for few new features to be added to FB and once it's done we'll plan to integrate the forum back in our site. In fact, we are not just planning for forum but for a full featured community site with features like forums, user blog, groups etc.