Retirement Kitty

How to cloak affiliate links

admin — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 20:35:37 +0000

You want to cloak affiliate links so that when someone is about to click on your link, they don’t notice that you’re sending them somewhere else with an affiliate id attached. See my Why Cloak Affiliate Links article for more information.

Send your affiliates to a new page on your website. Name this page whatever you want. In the html use the following code: (but replace affiliate with your id, and publisher with the id of the product you are promoting.)

Loading page…

Loading
page…

If you can use php instead of html, then use the following code:

header(“Location: http://AFFILIATE.PUBLISHER.hop.clickbank.net”);
?>
One thought is to put all of your links to your product links in one folder, such as /recommend, so when someone mouses over the link they see something like

www.yourdomain.com/recommend/product.php

Another thought is to put each product link in a separate folder and have the link index.html, or index.php respectively. Then when someone mouses over the link they see

www.yourdomain.com/product/

Learn from Affiliate Marketing Experts Free

admin — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 19:49:06 +0000

Joining forums is a way to not only ask questions and get responses, but to listen in on other conversations.

Sometimes you don’t know what questions to ask, or don’t have the time to ask questions. By reading through forum messages you will get a lot of great tips.

Beware though, many people use the forums as a way to sell things, so you may end up getting suckered into buying something you didn’t want.

Digital Point forums

Joint Venture forums – good for finding out programs just before they launch

Why cloak affiliate links?

admin — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 00:19:38 +0000

Cloaking means that you hide something from the user.
In this case you don’t want the user to see where you are sending them when they click on your link.

Someone might be put off and un-trusting of you if they know you stand to make some money off of their purchase. Purchasers often think that because you are making money as part of the sale, that they are paying more for the product, and that they may be able to obtain the product cheaper from the maker of the product. This is almost always untrue as makers and distributors charge the same for products in all most every market.

By cloaking your links you can also retain your own analytics on what is being clicked on, otherwise you must rely on the affiliate programs analytics to let you know which affiliate links are being clicked.
The analytics vary from service to service and keeping them inhouse keeps everything in your portfolio consistent.

Basic landing page optimization

admin — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 00:17:05 +0000

Domain name should have keywords in it.
Title tag should have keywords towards the front.
Heading tag should use keywords.
4% keyword density. So for every 100 words your keyword(phrase) is used four times.

When promoting your landing page, use these guides for your inbound links.
Use your keywords descriptively as part of the link.
Use related keywords before and after your link.
Use different keywords on your links so that not all inbound links are the same.
If your site has multiple pages don’t always link to the front page, link to the other pages as well, this is called deep linking.

What is a landing page?

admin — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 00:15:49 +0000

A landing page is where you direct traffic to. The page is usually just that, one single page website with information about the product you are trying to promote with your affiliate link on the page.

People visit your landing page, read your information and click through to the sellers page to learn about more information, and/or make their purchase.

Some people think that instead of spending time and money developing a landing page you could just send traffic to the sellers site with your affiliate link. While you could use your affiliate link when commenting on a blog or in a directory submission, you are setting yourself up for problems.
Others use a squidoo page or a hubpages page, or articles as their landing page. Again, trying to save a little money is only going to cost you more money in the end.

You want to maintain control of your traffic. You want to send your traffic to your own site, then decide what to do with that traffic.

Let’s say you are promoting a weight loss product and you are sending traffic directly to the seller. Suddenly the seller closes up shop, now your sending traffic to a dead link. If you send people to your own landing page focusing on weight loss, now if a seller dissapears, you can switch your affiliate link on your landing page to a new product. Sure you could do this on your hundreds of articles, but doing it once on your page is much simpler and you won’t accidently miss something.

If you are using pay per click to get traffic, usually you can’t use your affiliate link, so you will need a landing page.

Your landing page should include your own content about the product. You could explain how you use and enjoy the product, you could present an unbiased review of the product, you could compare several products, etc.

Landing pages are an important part of affiliate marketing, and every guru marketer uses them.

How much money can you make with Affiliate Marketing?

admin — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 00:11:37 +0000

You can make a great deal of money if you have the right tools and knowledge.

You can see what other people make pretty easily, because for some reason affiliates brag about their profits from affiliate marketing. This is bizzar behavior to say the least, but I believe it can be explained.

There are two main types of people that share their information. Succesful affiliates often times end up converting to selling their own products and harness the powers of affiliates to sell their products. These affiliate gurus then want to encourage and educate new affiliates. What better way to encourage affiliates to work harder than to show them what the rewards of affiliate marketing really is. They want to educate people as much as possible, because the better the affiliates do, the better the seller does.

The other type of person willing to show their success is noobies. These beginners are trying to learn the ins and outs of affiliate marketing. When they find a technique that converts, they want to share with others in their situation, because they know if they share, then others will as well, and they’ll learn new tips to get traffic or make conversions.

So take a look around at some of these screenshots and see for yourself that people are making anywhere from a few hundred dollars a month to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Social Traffic Building

admin — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 13:57:52 +0000

Having a popular site means money. Popular means that a lot of people like it. When someone visits your site they wonder if other people like what you have to say. If other people believe in you, why shouldn’t they? This is the reason for putting good testimonials on landing pages. But what makes those testimonials real? If you don’t have a place to comment on your site I wonder how did you get those testimonials? You obviously added them to your site, because they are written in to the HTML. Well adding pictures to match up to your testimonials make them more believable.

What if your new site is not quite popular yet, and isn’t converting well?

I propose that you add a real commenting system to your site. Prepopulate it with your testimonials, but allow visitors to add their comments as well. Make sure you are notified when someone makes a comment so that you can do any damage control by deleting comments if necessary. If your getting bombarded you could always require your approval prior to posting user submitted comments to your site.

Now these comments will have real validity, make your ideas seam even more popular, as you could easily have dozens of comments compared to a few hard coded testimonials.

If your getting good comments added to your site you’ll also improve your search engine ranking, as you’ll have additional content/keywords, and regular updates to your site.

People love to follow trends. Whatever you are pushing, make it a trend, even if nots quite the trend it appears to be yet.

What is clickbank?

admin — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 13:54:25 +0000

An affiliate program for digital products, of which many are e-books or software.

There are fewer restrictions on how you market their products compared to other affiliate programs, allowing you to promote the sale of products in many ways.

You also do not need to first be approved to start
referring sales.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

admin — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 13:32:27 +0000

Basically you create a way for someone, who is looking to buy a certain product, a way to find that product.

This is the basis of affiliate marketing. When items are purchased, a tracking code reports that you generated the sales lead and a sales commission is paid to you. Companies that are selling products online join an affiliate network as a way to get marketers to sell their products, giving up a portion of their profits.

Each year more people buy more things over the Internet. So the buyers are there. Looking through all the affiliate networks available, each with a couple thousand vendors, there is certainly enough things to sell for commission.

So is it an easy get rich quick opportunity? Not exactly. There are only so many ways that a person can type into a search engine to get at what they are looking for. Internet marketers know what people type to find something and they target that word or phrase, these are called keywords in the industry. There is a lot of competition for these sales leads, in fact thousands of sites are competing for the same keywords. In reality, a great deal of those sites are not doing a good job, and new products come out all the time that don’t have any competition at first. You’re on a level playing field.

What you’ll learn here is techniques and programs that will beat out the competition. Can you really beat out the big guys? Well there is one way you can absolutely beat the big guys. Instead of targeting the main focused keyword you target long tail keywords, less commonly searched for but also much less competition. If you can beat all the competition for your long tail keyword or even a few long tail keywords, then you will get real targeted traffic to your site.

Keyword Software to find the best keywords