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Newbie Project: Centralized Link Cloaking
This is something that I’ve always preached, but I have lazily not been following it. I have been always cloaking my links, but I haven’t been doing it from a central point and that is a problem. I want to tell you a story from a few days ago.
The Story When I first started my first site for CB selling, I used the 30 day challenge link cloaker because I told me the exact number of clicks. At the time, I wasn’t aware that CB had analytics for viewing them. It was sort of a stupid move because you want to have all your cloaking on property you control. You should never use tinyurl or any other service that you don’t own. One day those sites are going to go down and you could lose out on a ton of sales because they’re not sending you a memo. Anyway, back to the story. I decided that I was going to fix those cloaked links from the 30 day challenge cloaker and what did I discover??? One of the sites that I was advertising when I first started was dead. The link just went to one of those parking pages. Luckily for me, I wasn’t really sending any traffic to it and I don’t believe it ever converted at all for me. No big deal. It got me thinking though, sites will go down and there’s nothing you can do about it. You have to remain vigilant, so you need to have a centralized link cloaking method in place to deal with it. Basically, what I was doing is that I’d stick a php file in each directory, for each landing page I made, to just redirect to the affiliate link. This is good because it is property I control, but it is also bad because it creates hundreds of redirection links in many different directories. If you had hundreds of links to change, you’d be busy all day. With a centralized linking system in place, you can change 1000’s of pages in the matter of 2 seconds. Okay, all that written above maybe a little sloppy to follow, but I’m going to tell you exactly what you need to do. *I’m assuming you’re like me and fill up your sub directories with landing pages instead of buying a domain name for each product. What to do You’re going to come up with a directory on your website and you’re going to give it a name that doesn’t cry out “THIS IS AN AD”. You can put something like /go/ or /interesting/ or /neat/ or whatever the hell you want. In that folder you’re going to put in folders of the products you sell. If you’re selling “The ABC Acme”, than you’ll have a folder /abcacme/. You’re going to do that with all the products. In each folder you’ll have an index.php file that is designed to redirect to your affiliate link. If you’re unfamiliar with how to do a php redirect, just open up notepad and put in the following:
Save as whatever. Than rename it to index.php. That’s all you do. Now the directory you have chosen for this project, let’s say it’s /go/, is going to have an index.html file in here. Every new redirect you add for an affiliate, is going to go in the index.html file. This way you have an easy to follow list of all your affiliate redirects. Anytime you need to grab an affiliate link, you just goto www.domain.com/go/index.html and you got all your links in there. Okay, after I’ve written all that, this post probably comes off pretty choppy. I understand that. I’m going to give an example, so you guys can fully understand.
domain.com/go/ - is the directory/folder you’re going to use. That’s all there is to it. As your list of affiliate links grow, you may feel the need to organize the links. You can do what you want. You can actually spruce up the index.html page and drive traffic to it. All the surfer can do is click off to a sponsor. The Value Anyway. The value you get out of this is simple. Everything is organized in one directory. If ABC Acme goes down in 1 year, you just have to change that one index.php file and a 1000 pages are updated. The second value is that you have a list of every single affiliate link that you promote. You can easily go through this list, once a month, and check each site out in a matter of 5 minutes. That’s 5 minutes, to check if every single affiliate link on your site is going to a valid page. Pretty simple. *Note: It’s important to note that you can use htaccess to redirect to affiliate links. Just make sure it is done from a central point of view and everything is sweet. September 26 2008
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Affiliate Marketing Xpert was created for people that want to live the Four Hour Workweek lifestyle.
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