Affiliate Link Cloaking – Protect Your Affiliate Commissions
March 13, 2010 by Matt · Leave a Comment
Affiliate link cloaking is nothing more than hiding (cloaking) your affiliate links and one of the smartest things you will do as an affiliate is to start cloaking your affiliate links today. Why? There are two reasons! The first is that research shows that visitors are less likely to click affiliate links or links that look like affiliate links. The second reason is that affiliate link cloaking helps keeps thieves and dishonest affiliates from stealing your commission.
So you know what affiliate link cloaking is and what the benefits are, but how do you cloak an affiliate link? Well there are several ways to do this. Some are paid and a some are free. While most of the paid versions are honest, I have heard of affiliate links getting rewritten and people losing commission while using affiliate link cloaking software or scripts. I prefer to use the free way below, because I can be sure that no one is trying to overwrite my affiliate links and it is free.
Now on to the best method (at least to me). The first thing you want to do is create a directory (folder) on your hosting account and give it a name. What i do is name the directory after the product or service I am promoting. Example a directory named hostgator would mean that I am promoting hostgator hosting.
Once you have your directory created, you would then want to create a simple php redirect (below) using notepad and add your affiliate link to the redirect. Once you have added the affiliate link, save your new redirect as index.php and upload it to your new directory. Example - my affiliate link for hostgator would go into my new directory called hostgator. Now instead of some ugly affiliate link that scares away visitors, my new link will look like affiliatesblog.net/hostgator and my affiliate code is hidden from prying eyes.
<?php
header( ‘Location: http://youraffiliatelink.com’ ) ;
?>
While affiliate link cloaking does add a couple of minutes to your task, you are protecting your money and the hassle is well worthit. Feel free to copy the code above and save it as index.php and just remember to update the affiliate code each time you use it. To keep things uniform accross your site, I recommend using this on all outgoing links (affiliate or not), this way there is no difference in appearance of your outgoing links.
Be good!
Matt
Building Backlinks – An Easy Way to Build Backlinks
March 13, 2010 by Matt · Leave a Comment
If you are like me, you find building backlinks to be one of the most brutal parts of affiliate marketing. I find that building backlinks is boring and I really do not feel like I am accomplishing much, yet I know the importance of having backlinks to my sites. So I thought I would share with you how I go about finding links for my sites. Ready?? I follow my competition! Whereever my competitors are, I want to be. Where ever they stick a link, I need to have a link. Some people call it cheating, some call it blackhat. I call it an easy way to build backlinks for my sites.
So how do I find my competitors backlinks? Simple I type the following into Google
link:http://www.mycompetitorsdomain.com/
Once I have the results, I start going through the backlinks of my competitor and start finding places to add my own. So how do I find my competitors? I simply search Google for my keywords. Any site that comes up is my competition.
So as you can see, there is not much to my method. However, this extremely simple method can be very effective and yield some nice links. I recommend setting aside some time on a regular basis to work on building backlinks and by doing so you should (as long as your site is properly optimized) see an increase in your rankings.
Good luck
Is ClickBank Scamming Affiliates?
April 22, 2009 by Matt · Leave a Comment
I am not making accusations here, but I am reporting what I have found. There are a lot of accusations floating around about ClickBank shaving and/or stealing affiliate commissions. While I am not a big affiliate of ClickBank, I have noticed that my sales have completely stopped. Does that mean CickBank is scamming? No, but some of the arguments and claims being made on some of the most popular forums leaves me wondering if they might be scamming.
Personally I do not accuse ClickBank of scamming, but when I take a look at my personal stats I do see an issue. I have 3 sites promoting ClickBank products that have a ranking on Google of #1 – #5 for their respective keywords and used to generate a couple hundred dollars per week. Over the past few months my rankings have stayed the same, but my commissions steadily decreased to nothing and have been nil for the last five weeks. Does this mean ClickBank is scamming? No, but if they are not scamming, they have a serious tracking issue that is getting ignored and ignoring the issue is just as bad as stealing in my opinion. So what should an affiliate do? I would only push ClickBank organically and stop all advertising for ClickBank products until the problem is identified and corrected. No sense in spending money if you are not 100% sure you are gonna get paid.
Affiliate Marketing With Out a Website
December 9, 2008 by Matt · Leave a Comment
Affiliate marketing is an easy home business to start and has a small to moderate learning curve to get you started. As an affiliate, you will promote products through your website and earn a set amount for generating a lead or you will receive a percentage of the sale for promoting the product. But what do you do if you do not have a website or do not feel like you have the technical qualities to build one? You are still able to take part in one of the easiest ways to make money online. Here is how to get started.
Step One – Pick Your Topic or Niche
What are you passionate about? What are you good at? Answering these questions will be the easiest way for you to find your niche or topics. It will be easy for you to write articles about something you are good at or have a passion about.
Step Two – Pick Your Affiliate Product
Once you have chosen your niche, find affiliate programs that have products related to that niche. ClickBank is recommended for this plan, because they do not verify whether or not you have a web site.
Step Three – Write Articles
Research your topic and write 5 articles for your niche. Make sure to include your affiliate program link in the article and in the author’s biography at the end of your article.
Step Four – Promote Your Product
Create an account at Squidoo and create a lense with one of the articles. After completing your Squidoo lense, create blogger.com and wordpress.com blogs. Post an article on each blog. The fourth and fifth articles need to be posted at ezinearticles.com and goarticles.com. Last, submit a free ad at usfreeads.com promoting your product. Once your articles have been posted and you have a free ad, start linking the sites together. Add a link to the article posted at ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com and the ad at usfreeads.com to each of the blogs and the Squidoo lense. Once you have linked the articles and the ad, link the blogs and Squidoo lense together. Once you have all sites linked together, go to Ping-O-Matic and ping each blog, article and the lense.
Step Six – Rinse and Repeat!
Once you have your first niche completed, start the process over with a new niche. Aim to get three to four different niches completed.
Once you have completed your niches, you should aim to post one article per day per niche and rotate them between the blogs and ezinearticles.com. Writing quality articles will help visitors find your sites and click your affiliate links.
You Can Still Make Money Online With Yahoo Answers
July 20, 2008 by Matt · Leave a Comment
Yahoo Answers is one of the largest and most popular social networking sites around. Answers attracts visitors seeking specific solutions to specific problems. While this has been played for a while, this is still a very simple and effective way for you to make money online. Think about it, this is 100% targeted traffic for your offer(s). People need a solution to a specific problem and you have that solution. Now before I continue, you should know that Answers does not allow advertising of any kind, so you have to be smart about it or you will get your account banned or your IP blocked.
What do I mean about being smart? Simple, do not answer a question with a simple answer and a link or answer a question you know nothing about. Your answer will more than likely be flagged as abuse and your account is gone. Answer questions that you know something about and put some thought and research (if needed) into your answer. Your answer as well as the link should be a solution to the problem. You should work to make yourself an expert in your niche(s).
So how do you get started. Simple, create an account and start answering questions. I have also put together some tips and tricks below to help make you a little more successful.
- Open more than 1 account. I open 2 accounts per niche. This allows you to ask, answer and vote on your own answers for each niche you are targeting.
- Sign up for the RSS feed of each niche your answering. This will give you an automated update of all new questions asked right to your desk top.
- Send the affiliate links through a sub-domain of your domain. This will help you monitor traffic so you know what is converting and what is not.
- Try to target high paying niches such as credit, mortgage, insurance, weight loss, etc.
- Once again, make sure your question and the link provided provides a solution for the question being answered. Do not just drop links with a stupid answer or you will not be in business long.
As you can see, this is a really simple way for you to make money online and done right can provide you a decent income.
Good luck
Matt
