If you have several ads either rotating in various places on your website and or have multiple websites with multiple ads and advertisers you realize things can get out of control rather quickly and you can lose track of your advertisers or what banners are where. A few tools can help.

OpenX

If you’re not using the open source adserver OpenX, you don’t know what you’re missing. At first glance, OpenX seems complicated, it can be, but it’s not any more complicated than keeping track of multiple advertisers with multiple websites and campaigns.

OpenX is worth the time invested or the money invested in someone else to install and set it up for you. There are plenty of tutorials at OpenX.org, a forum and a list of paid consultants. I’m not on that list, but I can help you out.

In the next few days I will be uploading video tutorials explaining how to install, setup ad campaigns and installing into your WordPress blog.

Affiliate Director 2

Affiliate Director 2 is a great tool for keeping track of all of your affiliate programs.  AD2 is not only a central location to keep track of your affiliate programs, it also provides a cloaking link that hides your affiliate links. You use the AD2 links in your websites, so if any of your affiliate programs change or you want to change a link you change the link in one place instead of trying to find every link in every website that link may be installed in.

AD2 is a free tool if you’re a member of the Private Label Chest. It’s worth the price of admission.

CBFront

CBFront is Click Bank store front. It will import all of the Clickbank products into a store, but you can place any affiliate ad into the program and it will show up in your “store”. And that’s not even the best part, CBFront allows you to create ads that are similar to the Adsense format. You can install graphic or text ads, they’re not context sensitive like Adsense, but you can rotate ads each time the page is refreshed and narrow ads down to individual categories, plus the links are cloaked.

Use all three and you can keep your advertising and affiliate programs centralized and under control.

Links:

• OpenX
• Affiliate Director 2
• Private Label Chest
• CB Front