Witness:

So now I’m not able to use my favorite music service at Pandora.com.

Pandora works in the following fashion: You select your favourite artist and the service makes intelligent guesses at what other artistes you might like and plays them. So it’s like an intelligent jukebox.

And I can’t use it now.

I understand copyright and territorial issues, and this is a prime example of geotargeting. In this case, restricting access based on me living in Singapore.

If you’ve been on the Internet for a period of time, you’d know that surfing through country-specific proxy servers can alter your geographical IP origin, so geotargeting can be overcome.

In my earlier days as a blogger I shifted a significant proportion of my traffic through a Singapore-based IP, which severely skewed my traffic. My current Alexa profile provides a more accurate traffic picture, although there’s quite a variation from my actual traffic, which is highly US-skewed.

So what’s to be done about geotracking and geotargeting?

It’s useful to some extent and is one of the ways to visualize your traffic picture.

But if you’re using it to restrict access, it might be as successful as the attempts to “region code” DVDs according to geographical regions.

Eventually China manufacturers released region-free DVD players into the market and mucked up whatever plans the movie studios originally had in mind.

So back to geotargeting.

It’s obvious to be more effective, it needs to be stepped up a notch.

Perhaps proxy services should be IDed and incorporated into a red flagged “proxy zone”. But since it’s so easy to set up a proxy server anyway, is that really a useful exercise?

What do you think?

Savvy affiliate marketers will use geotracking scripts to ensure that relevant offers are served up to their audience.

With that being said, toggling geographical preferences in your PPC (pay per click) campaigns will help maximize your marketing efforts.

Beyond just paid traffic however, affiliate marketers can also determine community hotspots within a specific country and use social networking means to generate traffic for their affiliate marketing campaigns.

For example, to target UK-based consumers for a country specific offer, one might look at the top UK sites as ranked by Alexa.

By constructing a psychographic profile of your target for your CPA/Affiliate Marketing offer, you can determine where your targets might congregate among the top country-specific sites.

For example, the top 4 UK sites by Alexa ranking are:

• Google UK
• Yahoo!
• MSN
• Google

Google UK will give the greatest leverage as the content is very content specific. The other three sites will offer more generic content.

Likewise, the following results, like eBay UK and the British Broadcasting Corporation, will have a greater proportion of UK-based prospects.

By working through the list and specifically targeting sites which have a 70% or higher UK audience, you can achieve much greater results with the same amount of effort.

In fact, you might have greater leverage targeting only .co.uk domains, rather than just .com domains with a UK-specific section.

While this approach provides some indiciation, do take note that Alexa results are reflective of Internet users who install the Alexa toolbar.

Some segments like homemakers may be surfing the net using a barebones Internet Explorer and hence may not be comprehensive captured in the analytics of tools like the Google or Alexa toolbars. In these cases, community sites or forums might be a better avenue to get a pulse of these consumers.