Review: Super Affiliate Tracker
Web Marketing Today, Issue 127, August 6, 2003
Note: Wincer Song, the person who developed the software reviewed in this article has pirated web content from my site and many sites in order to increase traffic to his site. I can't recommend him or his products at this point. 12/12/2003
Super Affiliate Tracker
$79.95
SAT, Inc.
Jun Han, Singapore
Wincer Song, Shanghai, China
No phone or mailing address available
If you've ever sought good candidates for reciprocal links to your site or searched for the best affiliates to market one of your products, then Super Affiliate Tracker may well fill the bill. Just what is a super affiliate? One who scores high in the search engines, thus generating a lot of traffic for a particular keyword or keyphrase. How do you spot these people? A simple search on Google will give you the basic information, but Super Affiliate Tracker (SAT) simplifies the process.
SAT is a Windows 98/ME/2000/XP compatible EXE program that allows you to search up to five search engines (Google, AllTheWeb, MSN, Lycos, and Yahoo) for two items:
- keywords OR
- a URL
Thus you can find either all the high-ranking sites for a keyword OR find out who is linking to a particular site. With the latter information you can find out your competitors' affiliates or linking partners.
The SAT results page gives you six useful fields:
- Domain
- Sub URL (path within the domain to the resulting webpage)
- Alexa Rank (a rough gauge of traffic and importance)
- Search Engine Links (according to the search engine you chose for this search)
- Search Engine Rank (on the search engine you chose for this search)
- Owner E-mail Address
Click for a larger view of the screenshot
You can sort on each of these fields so you can find the top Alexa-ranked sites or those with the most incoming links. To the left of each line is a checkbox where you can select the most compatible sites. Then you can export these selected sites with each of these six fields into a comma-delimited text file. If you right-click on any of the entries you also get:
- WHOIS Information
- Alexa Report on the website
- Contact Information
Thus, you can usually find a mailing address, phone, and fax number -- if this information is listed -- on the site as well as their domain registration data. This contact data cannot be exported into a text file, but provides useful spot-check information that helps you select the most compatible super affiliates or linking partners. You can also import a file of URLs on which SAT can do its magic. And you can save the project file and rerun it later to note any newer results.
I very impressed with this basic functionality and see myself using this tool quite a bit. SAT is fast -- "multithreaded" is the technical term. You don't wait long for an answer once you click on the start button. SAT allows some of Google's special search features, such as using quotation marks around keyphrases and restricting searches with negative keywords. And I am delighted that the programmers have not give this tool tempting mass e-mailer capabilities like some of the popular reciprocal linking software programs, such as Arelis and Zeus. Searching for super affiliates, joint venture prospects, or linking partners must be done individually to be effective.
I looked for weaknesses and found only one. Although you can import a list of URLs that SAT can study, you can only search on the links to each of these competitor URLs one at one time; you can't do it in a batch. This isn't a flaw, of course, just an added bonus that might improve the product.
The product homepage contains its share of hyperbole:
"Our proven software will quickly locate Super Affiliates, Get them to Sell Your Products, While You Sit Back and Watch Them Drive Your Internet Sales Through The Roof!"
Actually, the software doesn't get them to sell your products while you sit back. It identifies the super affiliates for you. You have to catch the super affiliate's attention to get him to link to your product. And you and I both know you can't just sit back and expect that to happen without you working at it. "Sitting back" and "achieving success" are opposites -- though they're the stuff dreamers (not doers) love to imagine.
You can download Super Affiliate Tracker in a free 5-use trial version to see how the product works for you. I recommend Super Affiliate Tracker as a useful, robust research tool to build your team with high-performing affiliates as well as to identify likely reciprocal link partners.
Why don't you download a free trial version and check it out?
