Security On The Grow

In today’s wired world, you’re almost always connected to some source of network somewhere. Be it a laptop in your office, your tablet while you wait for coffee or your phone in your car. The world is moving more and more to an “always on” society which has its pluses and its minuses. Whether you welcome this change with open arms or shun it like a bad apple, being mindful to take a few easy security measures can save you and your IT team many headaches in the long run.

Laptops have become a wonderful tool for businesses allowing its employees to easily work on and display presentations from an environment the employee is already comfortable with. As prices go down, mobility of employees goes up but as an employee, you’re also seated with extra responsibility. Firstly, make sure your laptop is password protected at all times. You can easily lock a windows machine with the keyboard combination of pressing the Windows Key + L and you can set up a hot corner to lock your screen on a mac. Even if you’re only stepping away for a moment, someone can access your system and password locking your computer is a good habit to get into.

It’s also a great habit to have for a smartphone. As smartphones become more prevalent, you stand to lose much more by having your smartphone stolen than the personal contacts you lost with your feature phone 7-10 years ago. Having to enter some type of password to access your phone makes it much more difficult for someone to access sensitive information if they have access to your phone. There are also apps for both Android and iPhone that can help you recover a lost phone or help the police recover a stolen phone by using the built in GPS.

Finally, physical security isn’t the only thing to consider in a world of mobility. Your actual network security should always be a consideration. When conducting business away from the office or sensitive personal business (in particular online banking), be sure you connect to secure networks at least. This keeps people who may not even be near you from sniffing out your traffic and obtaining anything that was meant for only you or your company to see. If you’re extra paranoid about where you are, you may also want to consider connecting to your office VPN. VPN traffic is encrypted which will add an extra layer of security onto whatever you’re doing.

Keeping these few simple tips in mind can keep you secure and your IT team happy.

Post by: Liam Brucker, Systems Administrator

HTML has progressed a lot over the last ten years. We’re now on the feature packed HTML 5 but for optimum compatibility with the maximum number of email clients I believe it’s best to use good old fashioned HTML 4 or older with nested tables and a little inline CSS.

Golden Rules for Designing Compatible Emails

Set your containing table to between (500 and 700 pixels in width).
Have a single celled table of 100% width and match the background colour of this to that of your body background colour (many Web-mail clients will strip out the body tag).
Avoid background images.
Avoid rotating gifs.
Avoid colspans.
Use good valid HTML (tracking overlays mean you’ll rarely be able to send a fully validated email but it’ll be more than enough to ensure optimum compatibility).
Use inline CSS.
Ensure you have text links as well as linked images.
Always explain your email in a short and snappy description above the main creative.
Link to a hosted version of the email just in case all else fails.

CSS stands for cascading style sheets

There are three ways of creating styles:

• A linked style sheet.
• A set of definitions inside the opening and closing head tags.
• A style applied to an individual element.

This third way is called inline CSS and is the best way of defining style properties to achieve optimal cross client compatibility.

But no positioning!

Avoid using any positioning within your email creative.

Web developers will always knock HTML tables in favour of CSS but I believe they are one of the most important pieces of any email developers armoury.

With a well designed email I’m pretty sure html can match any CSS design – it just takes a little more thought.

Post by: Stuart Page, Senior Email Analyst

The past few years have seen widespread adoption of a new tradition: when spring … springs, it’s time to seek out those infrequently-used passwords and change them.  Most systems nowadays incorporate password aging - making a password expire after a predetermined time, but everyone has one of those online tools that doesn’t do this despite the benefits.  It’s good practice to take that security into one’s own hands.

Making a good password is simple, making a good password that is useful is another matter.  Making a complex password that can’t be cracked sounds like a good idea, until it’s written down to remember it, that defeats the purpose.  Making a memorable password that is easily-guessed is worse, so the trick is to balance the two and make a useable, safe password.  Best practices dictate you’ll have a string of eight to twenty characters, and that string includes a case change, a number, and at least one non-alphanumeric character.  Recent advances in computer technology and cracking techniques prove that even those tried and true standards are questionably safe now, and the best answer is to actually make a sentence or a short phrase instead of a single word, even if that word is obfuscated.  This simple technique adds astronomical amounts of time to a pernicious person’s attempts to crack said passphrase, enough to make it virtually impossible to break in.

The bad guys are always out there looking to steal data, and a good passphrase is the best defense - make it a strong one!

Post by: Matt Mensch, Senior Systems Administrator

1) Direct Site Media Buying

Direct site media buying is one of the highest ROI advertising methods online. It is simply buying banner ads and text links on high-traffic websites and forums and sending them to affiliate offers. There are a lot of misconceptions about display advertising, mostly that users have “banner blindness” and ignore ads on websites. In fact, the opposite is true, and smart affiliates are capitalizing on direct site media buying without having to spend $10k with a traditional display ad network. You also can avoid most of the restrictions that ad networks like Google and Facebook impose on their advertisers. Here’s how to get started promoting Intela’s offers with direct site media buying.

Step 1: Pick Your Offer

At Intela, we have hundreds of CPA offers available in dozens of niches. You’ll be able to find an offer easily by logging in to our platform and searching offers by vertical and payout. With direct site media buying, you can target the vertical of your choice, simply because their are tens of thousands of high-traffic websites in every niche. However, if you are just starting out, we suggest picking an offer that has an easily definable demographic. For example, a “beauty” offer would mostly target women between 18-49. However, as you build up your portfolio of banner placements, you can branch out and challenge yourself to find traffic for an offer with a less definable demographic.

Step 2: Select The Websites

There are two ways to find websites to advertise on.

a) Search Google for websites that rank well for the keywords you’re targeting.

b) Use Quantcast or Google Adplanner to find websites that target your demographic. For example, a fashion website targeting women in their 20′s would be a great place to advertise a fat loss or beauty product.

When you find a high-traffic site, look for contact details or an “Advertise With Us” page. If you can’t see their details on their site, do a “Whois” search and jot down their contact details so you can follow up with them.

Golden Rule: Always remember to check the website’s traffic levels on Alexa. While Alexa is not always 100% accurate, it will give you a clear picture of how much traffic the site gets on a monthly basis. and you can also see whether the traffic is dropping or climbing.

Step 3: Contact The Webmasters

By now, you should have found contact details of the websites you want to target. Email them with a professional request to buy traffic on a flat-rate basis. Not all website owners will reply right away, and that’s why you should always have at least 20-30 sites to contact and always be on the lookout for new places to advertise. When you actually do make contact, enquire about their traffic levels, pricing, placements and availability. Ideally, you should always aim to buy flat-rate priced placements (not CPM) that are “above the fold”, so the user doesn’t have to scroll to see your ad. You should always try to start with a 48-hour test. If the banner placement is $500 per month, calculate the cost for 48 hours ($33) and offer them a few bucks more ($40). Once you see that the traffic converts, pay the remaining amount to the website owner. Depending on the website, you can always negotiate for better rates over time.

Step 4: Optimize

Once you have your ad running, you need to focus on optimizing your campaign for the highest eCPM. We recommend that you rotate your banners, landing pages and offers until you reach the highest eCPM. To do this easily, you need an adserver, which will allow you to rotate creatives and optimize your campaigns scientifically. When it comes to banners, the rule is that they shouldn’t be boring! Be bold with your copy and design. A recommended resource to get ideas as to what banners are running successfully on the display ad networks is a site called WhatRunsWhere (see resources). However, an ugly banner put together in Photoshop or MS Paint can sometimes out-perform a professionally-designed banner!

Overall, direct site media buying (if bought on a flat-rate) can be extremely profitable. The advantages of this method are that you have direct relationships with several high-traffic website owners, you can start on a relatively small budget, and you’ve effectively cut out the middle man (the ad networks). Once you have a few placements running, it can be a very stable source of traffic since you’re not competing with other affiliates and have diversified your risk.

Direct Site Media Buying Resources:

Alexa

Quantcast

Google Adplanner

Whois

AdShuffle

What Runs Where

20 Dollar Banners

2) Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

Pay-Per-Click advertising is exactly what it sounds like; you pay everytime someone clicks on your ad. This type of advertising is highly recommended for affiliates who know the “EPC” (Earnings Per Click) of the offers they are promoting. For example, if you’re consistently getting an EPC of $0.75 promoting a CPA offer, you can confidently bid anywhere below $0.75 to get a lead. Of course, different traffic sources will have different quality and therefore will give you different EPC’s. The traffic you can from Google Adwords or MSN Adcenter will be different than the traffic you get from a second-tier search engine like 7Search. A few years ago, affiliates could easily promote on Google Adwords (easily the highest quality traffic around), but Google have since banned the majority of affiliates, and most affiliates now use sources like MSN Adcenter and Facebook. We highly recommend promoting our finance offers (Quick Credit Score and Belmont Thornton PPI Claims) with pay-per-click advertising.

Pay-Per-Click Resources:

Google Adwords

MSN Adcenter (Yahoo & Bing)

Facebook

3) Pay-Per-View (PPV)

Pay-Per-View traffic (sometimes called Cost-Per-View) is a cheap and effective way to promote email submit offers and build your email list (recommended for long-term affiliate income). This is how it works. You target users that have specifically agreed to receive advertising in exchange for previously downloading a game or toolbar. This is legitimate, permission-based marketing. You may have encountered PPV ads before; ever been on a website, closed the window and seen a few popup windows appear behind it? Those popup windows are PPV ads, and those advertisers were paying pennies per VIEW of their ad. To succeed with PPV advertising, you need to develop a list of thousands of keywords and relevant URL’s that are targeted to your offer. For example, if you were promoting a dating offer, you could have your ad pop up behind a high-traffic relationship advice website. If you bid correctly, your ad will show up everytime one of these users visits one of those competing URL’s, and you can leverage the hard work of other websites to funnel traffic to your offer.

Pay-Per-View Resources:

Traffic Vance

Media Traffic

Lead Impact

Direct CPV

CPV Lab

4) Newsletter Advertising (Solo Ads)

Newsletter Advertising is perhaps the most responsive traffic you could ever find.

If you can find a targeted newsletter to advertise your CPA offers to, you’ll be able to generate a surge of leads and sales without much effort. The reason that email traffic is so responsive is because these groups of people have shown their interest in your topic and are a captive audience due to their trust in the newsletter publisher.  It’s easy to find newsletters to advertise in, regardless of the niche you’re targeting. The first thing to do is head to Google and type in “your niche + newsletter”. So if you were advertising a diet product, you would search for “diet + newsletter”, “fitness + newsletter” or “fat loss + newsletter”. Make sure the sites you target look legimate and up-to-date, sign up to the newsletters and review the kind of content that subscribers are receiving. Once you have found a high-quality newsletter to advertise in, contact the site owner and negotiate pricing and a date when your ad will run. You can normally negotiate at 20-25% off the asking price of the ad. The next thing to do is contact your affiliate manager at Intela and ask for some proven email copy for the offer. If you’re advertising in newsletters regularly, we highly suggest sending the traffic to an opt-in page before they see the CPA offer. If you can build your own email list in this niche, you can follow up with more promotions and this can multiply your earnings in the long-run. Another benefit of newsletter advertising is that you only to find around 5 high-quality newsletters to advertise in; you can then run ads in each one every month.

Newsletter Advertising Resources:

Arcamax

Newsmax

Directory of Ezines

Now you’re armed with four extremely powerful paid advertising methods, why not start making money with Intela right away? Sign up here to get access to hundreds of exclusive, high-paying CPA offers: signup.intela.com

Posted by: Kunjal Kanabar, Media Buying Specialist

Recommendation engines are all over the web. We find them when we purchase things at Amazon, when we watch movies from Netflix and when we add new Friends to Facebook. The idea behind these recommendation engines is that based on similarities of items that are found between you and other users of the same application, the engine can infer your probable likeness of other items that you have not tried, books you haven’t purchased, movies you haven’t watched, friends you haven’t friended.

At Intela we are always pushing the limits of what the technology can do for our systems and applications and we have been working on ways to improve how we deliver a better service to our customers.

So a few months ago we started a project to look for a good recommendation engine that would allow us to create better and more targeted campaigns by using recommendations based on past behaviour from our users. We looked at several technolgies and concentrated our efforts on 2: The Google Prediction API and Apache Mahout.

We started working on a proof-of-concept application using the Google Prediction API which was in Beta at the time and built a very simple application that would give us a good idea of what the capabilities of the API were. We worked on several variations of it but in the end we found it was too restrictive for our needs and decided to move on to the next one.

Apache Mahout is an open source project that contains an impressive library of machine learning algorithms including recommendation engines, classification, clustering data mining and many other algorithms. We concentrated on creating once again a proof-of-concept for a recommendation engine. This time it took a little longer to familiarize ourselves with the libraries and API and how to provide the data for the recommender, but we soon had a very good application that was delivering the results we were expecting.

After a few months working on this we have finally deployed a couple of implementations of our own recommendation engine based on Mahout and we are starting to see very good results.

Intela has a reputation for very inteligent marketing… ladies and gentlemen… Intela has just gotten smarter.

Posted by: Emilio Suarez, Senior Software Architect

Building a successful user-experience is about simplicity and intuition. But how do these concepts translate across language and cultural barriers? At Intela we operate in many different languages and territories, and with that come unique challenges in presenting information in a way that reflects the cultural diversity across those many locales. We’ve found that keeping some simple concepts and ideas at the fore during the design and implementation process can alleviate a lot of common pitfalls and bad practices.

Language, be it written or spoken, forms the cornerstone of our ability to comprehend and process information. What may be intuitive and simple for a person who reads left-to-right (in English, for example) may seem disjointed and unfocused to someone whose language is written right-to-left or top-to-bottom. Browsers themselves do a lot to help with these issues (native support for LTR and RTL switching, for instance) but trying to keep your design and process as adaptable as practical, and as locale agnostic, will mean region specific language issues won’t hinder your carefully crafted user experience.

Beyond the differences that language makes are those of cultural and social convention. The things that may run contrary to what you perceive to be accepted and universally acknowledged fact. A good example of this is the colour red. In western culture the colour is red is bad: from the red stop sign to the red warning label it signifies danger or warning. Consequently, using red in your user interface to indicate a stop point is common and using it on calls to action and within a user process is avoided for the corresponding reason. But is this always the case? The answer is a resounding no. In China, for instance, red is a colour associated with luck and prosperity. In short, it has entirely different cultural connotations.

So does that mean that if you present a Chinese person and an American with a red and green button (and no other information) and ask them to identify the ‘bad’ or ‘stop’ action the American and the Chinese person will pick different options? Probably not. But what it does mean that relying solely on this type of cultural convention can lead to a confused user-experience for people of different cultural backgrounds.

This thinking lies at the very heart of user-cantered design. You are designing for your users and their needs and expectations, not yours.

Posted by: Joe Pettersson, Interaction Designer and UI Developer

Here at Intela we are really excited to have been ranked and commended once again for our revenue based rapid development. We have been placed in ColoradoBiz Magazine’s top 30% of fastest growing private companies! please read the press release here.

One of the Intela’s value statements is “we embrace cultural diversity of employees and markets”. This is not only a written value; it’s completely true. We are a global company and many of us come from different countries and cultures. Our diversity makes us unique and ahead of the other companies, allowing us to be successful.

One example is the Spanish project for the last quarter of 2011 and strategic lines for 2012. We prepared a brainstorm where we implicated all the Spanish-speaking people from all teams such as; the affiliate/publisher department, the email marketing department, the sales team, the accounts managers and obviously the European lead generation team.

In this session we gave input on the Lead Generation business SWOT and an evaluation of the current landing pages through a room tour, taking opinions and ideas from everyone’s point of view. We got input about the new prize draws and key moments in Spain and getting ideas from Spanish magazines as well. We also established the priorities of the new projects and the main lines on the Spanish speaking expansion.

The results were a Q4 performance plan and a creative plan with the time scale for release ready for the new labels. The first one, supermarket voucher, goes live this week. The next week we will have the Christmas Spanish basket label, very popular in Spain. And shortly a scooter, the most sold in Spain, a Christmas trip to ski at Vaqueira, the most luxurious place to ski in Spain, a cosmetics voucher, a watch and a prize draw with Apple products.

We will know the final results at the end of this year and during 2012, but the improvements are coming. Now we can elaborate faster and add more new prize draws with our fantastic in house designer, and create targeted campaigns, thus, generating more leads with higher quality and up to date with the new trends in Spain.

Posted by Xavier Penades, Online Marketing Executive.

Email marketing is effective for one simple reason: Customers like receiving targeted messages from companies they care about. They like when they