Key Tip for Online Success, Stop Reading Blogs!
The one main advantage of blogs is that it’s easy to love reading it. Because of it’s intrinsic nature, most people prefer reading blogs rather than the traditional media, newspaper, news sites and etc. Since bloggers are friendly and do prefer to interact with people, a lot of us have just put reading as one of our daily habits.
If you’re reading this article, you probably have heard this tip a lot of times. Stop reading and start implementing. But you’re reading this blog now which means you’re doing the wrong thing? Probably yes or probably no.
If you notice, the people who are telling you that tip are the same people known as bloggers. And bloggers are the ones who produce content and drive as much people as they can to read and read and read. So how is that?
The truth is they don’t really want you not to read their blog anymore, what they want is for you to read their blog and dismiss all the other ones. Sounds bad but that’s the case. YET if you follow that tip, it would benefit you A LOT!
Stopping reading blogs is not really about not reading at all, it’s about lessening your consumption. The problem with most people who love reading is that they consume and consume and consume until they forgot and forgot all the stuffs they’ve read. In whatever business you are, it’s not really them who will move your business, its YOU. So stop blog hopping, stop exploring the blogosphere, stop subscribing to them and start doing your own thing whether it’s affiliate marketing or whatever.
Reading 2-3 blogs a day is good but if reading and reading has become a habit of yours that it starts to hurt your productivity then quit on reading.
Importance of Domain Name in Affiliate Marketing
It will be surprising to know how the Super Affiliates earn great amount of money. There are some secret tools that they use but generally they never inform to anyone.
One of the secret techniques that they use is to transform a tough, complicated and long affiliate link into the smaller and easy to remember domain name. Then after, they forward this domain name to an affiliate link.
Most of the affiliate programs do not allow you to use their name. The changes in their name are also permitted. So, you need to register a generic domain name and point it to your affiliate link.
Suppose, you require to use one of your domains to advertise spyware removal software. For this, you need to use a short, seven letter domain name instead of using your actual affiliate link. Do not expect people to type this link as a domain name into their browser. You will be using this only when you put the listings in the search engines which allow pay per click such as Google AdWords, Overture, Enhance Interactive and FindWhat. So, what you are doing here is, sending the users directly to the sites with a domain that fulfills the requirement of the users related to the particular site.
Remember that the domain registrar should allow you to forward the domain to the URL for free or with very less cost. If you have a domain for your affiliate link, it can be useful to opt in the newsletter.
Picking Affiliate Offers To Promote
Today I am going to make a really quick post about picking an affiliate offer/s to promote. So assuming you have now completely understood the whole affiliate marketing concept and already signed up w/an affiliate network, we are now going to pick an offer.
So picking an affiliate offer to promote doesn’t really take a lot of efforts. Although some people would suggest you to do some research to find out what is hot and what is not, that is not really necessary. The best way to find out is by actually implementing so you could make a brief test if the offer is worth promoting or not.
Does that mean you have to lose money first? Definitely not! To help you make the decision is your beloved affiliate manager. Who the heck is he/she? Aff.manager is the one who holds you and communicates with you. It’s very important to develop a close relationship with him/her. So right after you signed up w/a network you can immediately shoot her an email asking for some top converting offers and how it is promoted. That way you are getting ahead way of everyone who’s not communicating with their manager.
If you already decided on an offer to promote you need to pay closely at the requirements and descriptions. In that certain page you can see where the offers are accepted (geographically), accepted ways of promoting it and the earningsperclick and etc.. Not following the requirements would give you a lot of headache as you’d just be wasting your time and money promoting an offer.
That’s it, questions are very much entertained…
Cloaking, Masking & Redirecting Affiliate Links
Heya Melvin here. 
From the last post we have defined and learned what is an affiliate link. Today we are going to discuss cloaking and redirecting links. Just a short question why do we actually need to cloak/mask/redirect links? Well as generations evolved and web surfers/buyers have become more ‘techy’, they have become more knowledgeable about affiliate links. If you have an affiliate link that looks like this ‘http://teethwhitener.com/?ref=googleguy’, it’s pretty obvious for them that the latter part is the referral key so its more likely that they would remove it.
Although these day affiliate companies have provided more solid-looking links and one which couldn’t easily be determined. Because of it the need for cloaking and masking has become less valuable. But still here we are going to tackle three different techniques.
Affiliate Masking – is simply making an affiliate link look like its not. It’s the most basic strategy and it happens at the status bar. In our example below, you can see that when you hover your mouse on the link it puts a different name/url. It can be done using javascript with the following code:
<a href=“http://www.true.com/?affiliate=affhat” onmouseover=” window.status=’true.com’; return true” onmouseout=“window.status=”; return true”>True Dating Program</a>
Link Redirection(most used) – is just simply making a link redirect or jump to the affiliate link itself. There are actually a lot of ways on doing it. There are also some thirdparty softwares that could get the job done for you for a very cheap price. Anyway here’s how to do it through PHP:
Cloaking URL (advanced) – There are so many webmaster blogs that call link cloaking as link redirecting and its retarded. Anyway link cloaking is simply just using user agents to show different stuffs to bots and humans. This is done by some affiliates to avoid hurting their organic rankings and keep them ahead of most sites and also to have better rankings. This is also regarded as blackhat but I believe it’s not (if you’re not caught).
So those are different ways on ‘hiding’ your link as an affiliate link. I would very well suggest to just use link redirection for newbies as it doesn’t really take much to do it. Also, it’s been the most widely used tactic in the industry. If you have some questions or concerns, use the comment form below.
What Is An Affiliate Link?
So we have just learned that affiliate marketing is basically selling other people’s product and getting an affiliate commission in return. The question is how the heck do these networks know that it’s me that sold the product and not the other affiliates? The answer is it could be determined through your affiliate links.
Affiliate links are simply unique links which determines whether the certain product being promoted is under you or others. What’s the difference of affiliate links from normal links? Take a look:
http://teethwhitening.com/?213123 or http://affiliates.network.com/9689
http://teethwhitening.com/
It’s easy to notice that the first and second url is the affiliate link. The text highlighted in red is the unique number for each affiliates. Of course it varies depending on affiliate network and cloaking links which we will discuss in future posts. You can also see in the other link that it’s a little different from the first. Why? As time passes by, affiliate networks has largely evolved. The second link is just a ‘jump link’ which when clicked, would also go directly to the first link. This has been done so affiliates could have better conversions and for the networks to have easier time in tracking. With that unique referral key, affiliate networks could easily track details such as clicks, impressions, conversions and etc. The third link, on the other hand is the direct link of the merchant. If someone purchases under that link, the merchant would get 100% of the revenue since it’s not an affiliate link
Just remember not to forget embedding your referral link to your landing page instead of just the direct link or you’ll just be wasting your time. In our future posts, we would be tackling ways on how to hide and cloak links for better conversions, so stay tuned!
