Make Affiliate Money

I’ve been messing about with web design for about a year now, using Dreamweaver as my weapon of choice. To be honest a lot of the websites I have developed have been based on the Dreamweaver Templates and CSS. And all of them have been html based. Any wizzy bits have been javascript and the only php mysql has been limited to pommo.org autoresponder.

About two months ago I was stuck with one of my sites, I wanted to add an element which was based on the current date, ie display several dates that were 3-35 days prior to the current date. I asked the question over at nichechoppers forum and some very helpful guys gave me the full code but in php. I explained I had no idea about php. “Just add the code to the webpage and rename the file .php” Surely it can’t be that easy! It is.

I fully intend to learn about php code (a book is on the Xmas List!), but have done OK with just copying and pasting code and playing with it for now. It has been trial and error, but I have just added a fairly complex bit of code to a finance domain I have www.creditfor.co.uk It was a free script that I simply cut and paste which is a Mortgage Calculator. I then modified it for £ instead of $ which was fairly simple, but then got a bit carried away and added some simple expressions to show the monthly interest only as well as the capital repayment. Playing about with this really has given me a better appreciation about how php works on a basic level.

I am told there is a good website out there for php tutorials and help called tizag.com but I am old school and prefer to read a book, so roll on Christmas.

Get stuck in guys and try it out.

Popularity: 1% [?]

If you are new to Affiliate Marketing you might not know about Link Cloaking or you may want to know how to do it.

There are several ways that I tested, I will give my personal view on each one.

1) tinyurl or offto.net cloaking websites.

When I didn’t know better I used offto.net to cloak my affiliate links, you simply put your hop link (http://affiliateID.publisherID.hop.clickbank.net) and the name of your link and they give you a url like http://offto.net/forexbrotherhood which looks better you will agree.  tinyurl and other examples are the same. 

The issue with these is that offto.net could change the link or go out of business or have server downtime all of which is out of your control.

2) Subdomain redirect

My host 1and1 allows me 100 subdomains on my current package.  A sub-domain has the format http://subdomain.domain.com and I created subdomains such as http://forexfunnel.forexrobotreviews.com and then used the 1and1 control panel to redirect this subdomain to my hop link.

I personally like the look of this, but recently I have had some issues where my affiliate id is not showing up on the payment page, so I have stopped doing this.

3) php redirect

This is the way I am now cloaking my hop links (I don’t cloak all of my hop links at the moment, only ones that might be changed by the purchaser, ie other Affiliates.)  You will need a website, hosting and a html/php editor for this, but it really does seem to work the best and most affiliate marketers use it.

You need to create a webpage such as forexfunnel.php and using the editor (I use Dreamweaver) and with no other text, html or php code add the following:

<?php
$url=”http://google.com”; // enter the url here
header(“Location: $url”);
?>

You replace the google.com with your hop link. You then need to upload the page to your website and use the link such as http://automatedforex.co.uk/forexfunnel.php

This looks professional and works just fine.

I am told you can use the following html meta tag instead if you don’t like php, but don’t be afraid of php like I was.  It really is much easier than it looks.

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0;url=http://google.com/”/>

I hope this is useful to some of you starting out.

James

Popularity: 7% [?]

A quick note tonight as I am still really tired after the long weekend and Weddings!

I had to make a few changes to a couple of my websites tonight as I had noticed some had been dropped by Google completely, I don’t mean just slipped a few pages, I mean not indexed.

One of them is The Forex Brotherhood which was riding high for “forex brotherhood” terms. It was a holding page and list builder during the pre-launch period and the end of August. Then I decided to redirect it with a hoplink to the Forexbrotherhood.com site, so when someone clicks on theforexbrotherhood.com it goes to the official site. I did this using a php redirect script on the index page.

This worked fine for a while and the site still ranked well for my keywords for several weeks giving me lots of hops and a few sales.

Then suddenly Google updated and the robots then found nothing, no meta tags, no content, no keywords etc etc. All of the links I have built obviously still remain, but they mean nothing if google finds nothing on the site. DOH!

I have reverted to a landing page with some keyword rich content and a list builder. Lets hope Google finds it again quickly and I can get back to where I want to be on the SERPS.

So my tip is, do not use php redirect on the index page if you want it to rank in Google, if you just want to use it as a direct link for ezine or adwords etc then fine, but I want search engine traffic too.

This might not be news to a lot of experienced marketers, but if one of you learns something then I am happy enough.

JZ

Popularity: 1% [?]