Prof Web Marketing

Free option for cloaking links

I just wanted to make a quick post to anyone else new to affiliate marketing to let them know a little tidbit I have picked up along the way.  It involves cloaking your affiliate URL’s.

There are a few reasons for doing this:

1. To make a “nicer looking” url appear in the user’s browser status bar.
2. To help hide where your offer is from to keep others from bypassing your link to keep you from earning your commission.
3. Some anti-virus/firewall programs don’t like affiliate links and if set up to do so, may keep the user from getting to the merchants landing page and worse possibly ruining your brand by doing so.

Some people simply use some code to completely hide the URL, that is keep anything from appearing in the status bar when a user hovers over a banner or link.  I personnaly don’t like this method, because it seems like the person hiding the link is trying to pull the wool over my eyes, but thats just me.

The method I have been using, which you can view in action by hovering over any of the banners on this site, is that of a “jumpscript”.  A jump script is just a php redirection script.  Anyone with php knowledge can create one of their own, but since I’m only just beginning to hack my way through simple php edits, that wasn’t an option for me.  Luckily, I found a pre-made script on Steve Dawson.com. It’s simple enough that anyone can edit and use it, and Steve gives a full rundown on the script on his site.

What it does is take an ugly affiliate link like http://www.gopjn.com/t/QjtGQ0I7RUFARTs_Rj4, pointing to my “Review Me” affiliate landing page, and make the link appear as http://www.profwebmarketing.com/jump.php?m=review-me in the users status bar. Looks a lot better and also adds credibility to the user. You can also rename the jump.php to whatever you like, to make the link look however you like.

One word of caution though, to avoid being penalized by the search engines for having a ton of blank pages, you will want to add a line to your robots.txt file to disallow indexing any url with jump.php(or whatever you might name yours) in it.

just ad this line to your robots.txt

Disallow: */jump.php*

I misread some info saying that MSN ignore 301’s and robots.txt so you want to use a php script instead of .htaccess and 301 redirects to avoid being penalized.  Sorry.

Option #2 – Optimize My Site

Those of you that have been involved in The Black Ink Project already know about this software. Along with link cloaking, it offers much more for affiliates.  From the site:

Optimize My Site (OMS) is a self-hosted affiliate tracking program that can significantly increase the profitability of your pay per click (PPC) campaigns. OMS works by showing you what ad groups, ads, and keywords are converting, and which ones aren’t.

I have not used this product yet, but the people who have used  version 1 absolutely rave about it. Even though I have not used the software, I have no problem recommending it because the Creator Jeremy Palmer of The Black Ink Project and Quit Your Day job is a great guy giving free training to over 1,000  affiliates.  I myself am brand new to affiliate marketing, but the knowledge I have gained in the last 2 months is enormous.

For those who don’t know about The Black Ink Project or its sister site Quit Your Day Job
I suggest that you go register now, especially if you came here looking for information on working from home or on affiliate marketing.  The amount of information provided on these 2 sites will be enough to keep you reading for quite a while and best of all it’s FREE!  Also, you might want to get there now because Jeremy is already planning The Black Ink Project part 2 and has said that there will be a limit to how many people get registered.

I plan on getting Optimize My Site as soon as it is available and I think it is a must for anyone serious about affiliate marketing. By using what I have learned in the last couple of months and  putting it into practice along with OMS, I feel very confident that I can reach all of my goals no matter how high I set them.

Don’t have the money or don’t want to invest it right now?

If you can’t get OMS right now and want to put an affiliate tracking tool to use don’t fret, there is a free tool available.  Prosper202 is a free affiliate ppc tracking tool.  Once again, being new to affiliate marketing, I have not had the chance to use it, but I hear great things about it.  Also, I hear that the level of support given is 2nd to none, especially for an app that is free.