Quick Tip – Simple Affiliate Cloaking Method

The last 3 days have been super hectic around the office, so I have not had much time to write. My business partner Mark has been on a 2 week vacation and will be back to work on Monday, and in his absence I have had to do everything around here, so I am a little behind. Plus, my kids just got out of school Tuesday for summer break. So today is going to be one of the first of what I am calling “Quick Tips”. It will just be a quick tip on how to do something specific. I am thinking about making this a once a week type post, but we will see how it goes over.

Today I am just going to show you a quick way to “Cloak” your affiliate links. There are a many reasons to do this, but probably the best reason is it helps keep people from hijacking your affiliate links and stealing your commissions.

There are lots of different ways and services out there with which you can cloak your URLs. Simply do a Google search for “URL Redirection Services” and you will see lots of different options.

For this post I am just going to show you a really simple PHP script that you can create in seconds and works great for a simple redirection.

Here is what we use on a lot of our sites. Now this only works if your server is running PHP. Again, there are probably lots of ways to do the same thing, but this is what we have always used.

1) Open up a text editor like Notepad and paste the following code onto your page:

—————————————————————-

<?php

$URL=”http://www.PUT_AFFILTIATE_URL_HERE.com“;

header (“Location: $URL”);

?>

—————————————————————-

2) Change http://www.PUT_AFFILTIATE_URL_HERE.com to whatever your actual affiliate link is.

3) You have 2 different options on how to save it and I prefer the 2^nd method (which takes an extra step or two), but both work fine.

• Give the file a name and end it with .php extension. For example is you were promoting an affiliate program for guitar lessons, you might want to call it “guitar-lessons.php”. Then you just upload the file to your server and you are done. Then whenever you are promoting that guitar course you would use the address www.YOUR-WEBSITE-URL.COM/guitar-lessons.php.
• With this one, you are going to need to create a “folder” with whatever title you like. For the guitar lessons example, you will probably want to call the folder something like “guitar-lessons”. Next you want to save the file you created above as “index.php” and save it in the “guitar-lessons” folder. Then you just need to upload the entire folder to your server and you are done. Then whenever you are promoting that guitar course you would use the address www.YOUR-WEBSITE-URL.COM/guitar-lessons. Another option you see nowadays using this method is;  create a main folder entitled “recommends” (or whatever you like) and they upload all the affiliate folders into that file, which also helps organize the folders on your server. Then whenever you are promoting that guitar course you would use the address www.YOUR-WEBSITE-URL.COM/recommends/guitar-lessons.

So let me show you step-by-step real live example. I will create a redirection URL for an affiliate link to Jamorama.com, which is one of Clickbank’s top selling merchants for Guitar Lessons.

Step 1) I pasted the following into a blank Notepad document:

—————————————————————-

<?php

$URL=”http://www.PUT_AFFILTIATE_URL_HERE.com”;

header (“Location: $URL”);

?>

—————————————————————-

Step 2) I changed http://www.PUT_AFFILTIATE_URL_HERE.com to my actual affiliate link:

—————————————————————-

<?php

$URL=”http://mrdomains.jamorama.hop.clickbank.net”;

header (“Location: $URL”);

?>

—————————————————————-

Step 3) I created a main folder called “recommends” and then a sub-folder called “guitar-lessons” and I saved the file as index.php in that folder.

Step 4) I uploaded the folder “recommends” with everything in it to MakingMoneyOnline.com and I was done.

Step 5) Now, whenever I want to promote Jamorama, I just point people to: http://www.makingmoneyonline.com/recommends/guitar-lessons and it takes them right to Jamorama via my affiliate link. Give it a click and see it works.

After you have done this once, from then on all you need to do is create the file and affiliate folder and upload them into the “recommends” folder and you are done, which literally can be done in less than one minute.

This method also REALLY WORKS GREAT when you create eBooks and eCourses, or even offline affiliate marketing. I have even used this method on business cards.

Hey Bloggers, Scratch Our Blog and We’ll Scratch Yours

I was reading an article the other day explaining different ways to get people to leave comments on your blog and one technique that stood out to me was fairly simple (my favorite kind). He said that you should spend a little bit of time each day visiting blogs in your niche and to leave relevant helpful comments on blog posts that interest you. The more helpful you are the better chance you have of raising your profile, which hopefully will drive more traffic to your blog. That totally makes sense.

Well that got me thinking. How can we get people to leave comments on our site even faster? What can we do in exchange for them leaving a comment(s)? I know there are thousands of new blogs started each week and I am sure most of them would love to get comments. One thing I have noticed is… if you take the time and post comments on smaller blogs that don’t get a lot of activity (ones with fewer comments on them), that often the owner of that blog will checkout your blog to see what you have going. Many times he will leave a comment on your blog as gratitude for your comments. This can happen with the Big Boy blogger sites as well, but probably not as often.

So the next thing that popped in my head was a “comment exchange” program, so I did a quick search on Google and saw that there were some that already existed. We looked at a few of them and read different reviews, but we were not too impressed with any of the ones we saw. So we decided not to join any of them.

What we did decide to do is try our own non-formal comment exchange program. Here is how it works… If you leave at least one “helpful and relevant” comment on one of our blog posts (just writing “Great Post!” does not count), Mark and I will do our best to checkout your blog and return the favor with a comment as well. Sound good?

Now we are not guaranteeing anything, as we do not know who will be commenting on our site. But if you have a good blog started with some interesting content, we will definitely do our best to leave you a comment.

Now this is just a test, so we have to have a cutoff date just in case it doesn’t work or if it works too well and we get overwhelmed with comments. So let’s make the cutoff date July 15, 2009 and evaluate how it worked, and then decide if we should extend it.

Here is one more suggestion that will hopefully benefit any of you who decide to participate in our comment exchange. Why not visit the sites of the people commenting on our blog and leave a comment on their site as well? There is a chance that they are participating in this test too and they might leave you a comment back on yours as well. You have nothing to lose and you definitely will get more exposure.

UPDATE JULY 20, 2009 – We just wanted to thank everyone that has been leaving comments on our site and we have tried  to return the favor to each of you. In doing so we have found lots of great sites that we never knew exisited. Since this is working so well, we will continue to visit anyone’s site who leaves a comment on our site. We will also try and return the favor on your site and hopefully we can build lots of longterm friendships in the process.