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Affiliate Link Cloaking - Part 3

Posted on October 29, 2007
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing | 3 Comments

Following on from the first two posts on how to hide and cloak your affiliate link, here is another very popular way to achieve the same results. This particular way uses a PHP redirect that can easily set up by using a WordPress Blog and FTP.

This part of link cloaking is most often used by the big boys in Internet marketing as it is quite effective in making your link look like it is an extension of your own website and not an affiliate link.

To do this, simply follow the steps outlined below and you should be ready to go in an instant.

What you need:

1.) WordPress Blog or anything else that works with PHP script.

2.) Notepad or similar

3.) FTP account. I use Smart FTP it is free.

Once you are ready, lets get started on the following.

1st: you need to create a new folder and save it on your hard drive. Use a location you can remember later (Name the folder “recommends” or “go” or whatever you like really.) Just take note that this folder will become part of your affiliate link in the end.

2nd: you will open up a new notepad file and input the following code

<? header("Location: http://putyouraffiliatelinkurlhere"); ?>

image Instead of the above URL within your code, you insert YOUR affiliate link. Click save as and choose “all files”, then name the file after the affiliate program you are wanting to promote.

Example: if you want to promote Dell computers, then name the file “dell.php” or similar. You need to type the extension .php into the file before saving, otherwise you will end up with a text file instead. This step will save your file as a PHP file.

3rd: save your new PHP file in your newly create folder from the first step.

4th: repeat step two as often as you like for all the affiliate programs you use, naming them all with the appropriate affiliate program name.

5th: Open up your FTP account and upload your folder (go, recommends or whatever you name it) to your public_html.

6th: don’t forget to update all your affiliate links to reflect the new path. In the example of the Dell link above your newly create affiliate link will now be

http://www.yoursite.com/go/dell.php (if you named the folder “go”)

See Affiliate Cloaking Part 1

See Affiliate Cloaking Part 2

Monika Mundell

Owner and Author of Blogging Web 2.0

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Small Time Affiliate Marketing

Posted on October 24, 2007
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing | Leave a Comment

We’ve been over affiliate marketing already, but from a blogging perspective there is much to be said for including some affiliate links in and around a blog.

This is small time affiliate marketing and don’t expect one blog to make money by the truckload in doing it. Who said you have to stick with just one blog?

I’ve been looking at this from a slightly different angle lately and have realized that you have to think in terms of a bigger vista. One blog is fine if you only want to tick over money wise to begin with and see where your promotional efforts take you. There are plenty of successful bloggers out there who only run one blog. A big part of that success comes down to building that blog up so that it has a huge readership and then you can make money by charging advertisers a small fortune for you valuable high traffic space.

But when your blog hasn’t got that kind of grunt and you need to start pulling in the dollars, there is an alternative to get things moving, although it does entail a lot of work. Doesn’t it always?

It means finding several niches and doing the required keyword research work and then setting up several blogs to cater for each niche. Then using the affiliate programs you already belong to (join more if you need to), put up affiliate links on all of your blogs.

The method in this madness is by rationalizing that if one blog makes you “x” amount of dollars from it’s affiliate sales, then ten blogs will make ten times as much. Give or take depending on the popularity of the niche. That’s where your research will pay off of you’ve found some good niches to begin with.
It won’t work if you don’t. Plain and simple.

So depending upon how ready you are to take on a whole load more work, you can turn small time affiliate marketing into a big time business.

Because if ten blogs make you ten times as much, think how much money you could make with twenty, thirty or more blogs… if you can manage that many!

Here’s to your success!

Terry Didcott
Author and Creator of Blogging Web 2.0

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Affiliate Link Cloaking - Part 2

Posted on October 21, 2007
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing | Leave a Comment

In the last post of affiliate link cloaking we looked at ways to disguise your affiliate links, so that they are not that obvious on the initial glance. It was the simplest method of all, but also the one most beginners choose once they become aware of affiliate links being hijacked by others to keep the commission themselves.

In the end, it is certain that to allow for maximum affiliate commission retention, we need to cloak our links and make them look more pleasing to the eye. All the big marketers do this all the time. In this portion of our affiliate link cloaking series we will look at even more ways to disguise our links.

However, to do this part you will need to have your site hosted on a server. It won’t work with free domains such as blogger.com or even wordpress.com

The following code can be copied and pasted into notepad. Simply choose which Clickbank affiliate product you would like to sell by doing a search on Clickbank’s marketplace. Just remember to name the notepad html file with the name of the actual product. I.E. if you are trying to sell “blogging success” you will name the file “blogging success” without the quotation marks as an html file. This will make you affiliate link more official looking. Once it is uploaded on your domain you advertise it by using the URL http://YourDomain/Blogging_Sucess.html

You will also need to replace the AFFILIATE part of the URL below with your Clickbank ID, the same applies to the PUBLISHER part. There you need to insert the actual name of the product publisher.

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<title>Loading…Affiliate Builder.com</title>
<META HTTP-EQUIV=”Refresh” <CONTENT=”0;URL=http://AFFILIATE.PUBLISHER.hop.clickbank.net”>
</HEAD>
<body><P>  </P></body>
</HTML>

Paste this code in notepad and save it as an html file and upload it to your server and use that address instead of your hoplink.
ie… http://YourDomain.com/Your_product.html

This method should then redirect your visitor if they click onto your link to your affiliate product link. It is a better way than the free options as it does look more professional already.

Keep your eyes posted for Part 3 of this series. You will learn even more ways to disguise your affiliate links and before you know it, you will be a skilled master.

image

Monika Mundell Creator and Author of Blogging Web 2.0

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Reviewing Affiliate Products

Posted on October 19, 2007
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing | 2 Comments

Following on from my last post about Clickbank, I was asked about whether it’s better to actually purchase a product yourself before promoting and reviewing it on your own site (see comments).

When I first started to promote affiliate products, I wondered about this dilemma too. I believe the jury is still out on whether it’s really necessary to purchase a product yourself before selling it. Of course, if you do have the product, then you can give an in-depth and unbiased review and possibly make more sales because you can state that you have bought the product yourself making your review more believable.

The flip side is that if you don’t want to buy the product, you can find other affiliates who are promoting it and see what they say in their reviews. If you can find several different reviews that all give a reasonable amount of pros and cons then you can base your own review on their findings. In that case, it’s worth mentioning that your review is based on the recommendation of several reliable sources - something that newspaper reporters do all the time and get away with it!

Whatever you decide to do, one thing you should never do is try to mislead you readers.

If a product has been given the thumbs down from several reliable sources, chances are it’s a lemon and you shouldn’t promote it anyway. You’d be committing professional suicide by promoting any product that turned out to be a scam, so be careful!

A good place to find out about many different Internet Marketing products is the WhyDoWork forum, as the members are constantly digging up new products and questioning the merits of them, to which other members who have tried the products can answer truthfully. This is an excellent source of product review material and one that should be consulted on every affiliate product that you decide to promote yourself.

So you do have a choice whether to actually buy a product yourself or not before promoting it as an affiliate. Just make sure that before you do anything, you research the product first - you don’t want to promote a scam product any more than you’d want to buy one yourself.

Terry Didcott
Author and Creator of Blogging Web 2.0

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ClickBank

Posted on October 18, 2007
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing | 5 Comments

Affiliate Marketing is a great way to make money from blogging when it’s done properly.

One of the easiest ways of getting into affiliate marketing is by signing up with ClickBank and making use of their extensive database of digital products and services that can easily be downloaded by the customers that the affiliate marketer sends to the vendors’ sales pages. Of course, there are two sides to Clickbank - that of the vendor who has a digital product or products to sell and that of the affiliate marketer who will promote those products in order to earn commission from all sales that are generated from customers they introduced. For the purposes of this article, we’ll assume you’re going to be working as an affiliate in order to make money from those commissions.

Signing up with Clickbank is the easy part. It’s a straightforward form to fill in and you create your own user name and password. Then the fun begins…

To get the best from Clickbank, especially if you’re new to affiliate marketing is to focus on niches that are nothing to do with Internet Marketing (IM). The niches you choose will depend entirely upon your own choices. These will be topics that you know enough about to be able to work with enthusiasm and drive in order to promote the products effectively. You will also need to have done your homework by researching keywords, consumer trends and other factors that will affect the potential of your chosen niche to make money for you.

You don’t actually need your own website to be an effective and highly profitable affiliate marketer. Many have done very well by using free hosted blogs and Squidoo lenses, so that choice is also yours.

One thing about having your own professionally hosted website is that you have total control on the content that will appear on your site, plus you will have the advantages of large storage and bandwidth as well as excellent guaranteed uptime that your host will provide.

Once you have decided on your medium, be it free hosted blogs or professionally hosted websites/blogs and you have found a potentially profitable niche, then you can start trawling through the vast database at Clickbank for products to promote.

There are some things you need to look out for when choosing which products to promote. Once you get the list of products displayed there is certain statistical information associated with each item that is of great value to you, if you know what each statistic means. Here is a summary of what you’ll see:

These figures should influence your choice of products to sell, as you might find it difficult to get many sales from those with heavy competition, so it might be wiser to stick to products that have lower gravity and % referred figures.

Once you choose your product to sell, there is a link to “create hoplink”, which is your unique affiliate code for that product. The resulting link you are given is what you should enter in your own promotional review of the product that you will write and publish on your blog or website. This is how Clickbank tracks which customers were referred to a product by which affiliate. A cookie with your hoplink is placed on a customer’s computer, so when they come to make the purchase, even if it is several days after being referred from your site, you are credited with the sale and will receive your commission.

This has a downside in that many people now use anti-spyware software on their computers, some of which block cookies from being set, which effectively negates your sale. Many affiliate commissions have been lost because of this and at present, Clickbank have not come up with a solution to the problem.

Still, don’t be put off by this. There is still a lot of money to be made from affiliate marketing using the services of Clickbank and the beauty of it is that once you have your site up and running with your carefully reviewed affiliate products displayed, your energies can then be directed to promoting your own site in order to attract as many people as possible, any number of whom could be potential customers just waiting to buy one of the products that you are promoting.

Here’s to your success!

Terry Didcott
Author and creator of Blogging Web 2.0

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Squidoo-Licious

Posted on September 29, 2007
Filed Under Squidoo | 4 Comments

Terry talked about the benefits of creating a Squidoo lens and how it can help you with traffic and help to compliment your website/blog. There is also a 3rd way to use Squidoo for your business and that’s by setting up an affiliate lens. Now before we go into this you need to understand two things.

  1. Understand how keyword marketing works
  2. Don’t make the mistake of advertising the standard affiliate programs

I’ve had very good results when I set up some lenses a couple of month ago to use them for affiliate marketing. I admittedly let them go and as a direct result they dropped ranks which means my sales pretty much stopped as I’m no longer on Google’s first page. I also know, that if I had persisted with these lenses, I would still make money. The beauty about this is that I can get myself onto page one of Google any time by duplicating what I did then successfully with 5 lenses within 1 week!

haapy-stick-figures.jpg

Now some of you might think “but what the heck are you doing dropping money like that”? The thing is, firstly I’m far too busy these days having time to follow on with this. ( And I make more money with what I do). Secondly to make a lot of money, you will need a lot of lenses and they all need to be updated every day if possible. This results in quite a bit of work and is fine if you currently struggle to make any money. On average you’ll make about $30/month per lens, but this directly depends on the products you market.

First you need to find niches that are not discovered by the masses, e.g. leave your hands off Internet marketing. Once you found yourself a niche you need to set up your lens. The lens needs to be keyword rich both in the title and in the body. The body of the lens should be full of related information about the product/services you offer.

The key here is to write a descriptive summary about that said product without giving away all the information. You want people to click through on the links you provide and these links should be your affiliate links. Where most Squidoo users go wrong is by using the traditional affiliate programs that have been chewed to mulch already. Don’t make the same mistake! There is an alternative - It’s called CPA networks.

These networks will allow you to sign up as a publisher and 3rd party advertisers (those with the product) pay you either per lead, or else per sale. Provided you are in the right niche, these CPA networks can help to put money in your pocket.

I have listed some CPA networks here to get you started on the right track. You’ll need to do some research yourself and see which ones would best suit you and the keyword you have come up with. Have fun and let us know how you go please.

CPA Networks:

signature.jpgMonika Mundell Creator and Author of Blogging Web 2.0

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Affiliate Link Cloaking Part 1

Posted on September 24, 2007
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing | 1 Comment

If you are an affiliate marketer you probably wondering why you never make any sales. Maybe your are not even aware that some people steal them from right under your nose. But how can that be - it’s easy really. If you are like most people promoting clickbank as an affiliate marketer, then those in the know will simply replace your clickbank id with theirs when they are about to purchase a product from your site. What this means for you is two things.

  1. You won’t get a commission as the sale is officially going to the buyer who stole your link
  2. You will get very frustrated and eventually give up altogether on affiliate marketing

Either way it isn’t a very nice experience for you. But there is a way to cloak your links quite easily provided you have your own web hosting.

If you don’t, then there is still ways to circumnavigate this issue by cloaking your links with an URL shortener. Instead of having an ugly URL that would read like

clip-it.jpg

http://www.vendor.com/12grus?=xxxx or similar, you could have one that reads

http://doiop.com/blogging

This is in my eyes still not the best option as it screams affiliate but looks better than the first option anyway.

The following 4 sites allow you to cloak your link for free:

  1. Diop - you can cloak your link by choosing your keyword.
  2. Tiny URL - create a tiny URL from a long and ugly one, the downside of this site is that most good URL’s are already taken
  3. Read This URL - with this one you can even tag the links
  4. Memurl - Lets you create a mnemonic URL that looks like this http://memurl.com/kusipe

These cloaking helpers should however only be used, when you don’t have your own hosting - e.g. your site/blog is on a free platform.

A much better way to install a redirect link is via .htaccess. To do this, you will need to navigate through your CPanel to - File Manager - public_html - .htaccess - click on edit file - then put in the following code:

Redirect /recommends http://www.youraffiliatelink.com

What this will do in effect is to redirect the affiliate link from your website with the extension of the folder name you gave it. In my case the folder name is “recommends”. So the link I would advertise would be

http://www.bloggingweb20.com/recommends instead of the ugly looking affiliate link. Make sure that you leave one space between your “Redirect” and the backslash (/) as well as between your folder name and the beginning of the URL.

Naturally, there are even more ways to cloak your affiliate links, but for now we will leave it at that as it will keep you busy in learning new things. (For those who didn’t know this)

Keep your eyes out for Part 2 of this series.

To your Success

signature.jpgMonika Mundell Creator and Author of Blogging Web 2.0

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