Pastrommy [dot] Com

Archive for the ‘Affiliate Marketing’ Category

I launched yet another affiliate marketing site today based around the guitar niche. Instead of making a Squidoo lens and pushing traffic with articles, I opted to try something new. I installed Joomla onto the domain and stripped it down as far as I could to make it look like a real sales page. It actually looks really good! Followed up with some PPC ads on Google. I’ll see how it pans out and post some results. I plan on seeing what else I can do with this Joomla sales page business…

My tip today is on masking affiliate links. If you don’t know what masking affiliate links means, it involves hiding your affiliate link so that visitors aren’t wary of clicking on it. For example, which looks better?

a)strommy.product.hop.clickbank.net/
b)www.myproductsite.com/goto/product.php

The answer is “b”. This is because the link appears to be internal and have no marketing affiliation. It’s not very hard to believe that people wouldn’t click a link simply because it’s an affiliate link.

So how do you mask your affiliate links? My favorite way of masking links is to create a folder named “goto” somewhere on my server and putting PHP redirect files for every link I have. In other words, after you’ve created a folder named “goto”, assuming the example above, you would create a file called “product.php”. In this file place the following code:

<?
header(”location: strommy.product.hop.clickbank.net/”);
?>

Using the above example, everytime someone clicks my link “www.myproductsite.com/goto/product.php” they will be redirected to “strommy.product.hop.clickbank.net/”. Some say that PHP redirects are a bad idea if you plan on using Pay Per Click advertising but I’m not sure if it’s true or not. What is your favorite way of masking affiliate links?

Yesterday while searching the web I came across a site that talked about how much money can be made online, how easy it is, yada yada yada. Whatever it was talking about, it motivated me to kick it in high gear and start making money with affiliate programs. Since my experience thus far is minimal and I’ve yet to have a big breakthrough, I decided I should learn affiliate marketing from the ground up again.

After searching around the net for some free courses, I found The Affiliate God. This website is made by a guy a lot like myself except he’s way more successful than I could ever hope to be. Anyways, the course is broken up into 4 weeks of videos that you could easily get through in a day if you wanted. I decided to watch all the videos from week 1 yesterday. I’ve got to admit, and no that is not an affiliate link up there, that his videos were probably the best training videos I’ve watched. He is very easy to listen to and comprehend because he takes a very laid back pace through all the videos. I also found myself laughing more than one time when he would stumble on words or what not. Basically, he keeps you entertained through the whole thing as well as giving you a plethora of information.

Armed with this new information I set out on completing my week 1 niche site. I’ll let you know how it goes. In the mean time, check out Frank Silvestre’s blog on Finding a Money Making Niche.

I’ve found that one of the best ways to get motivated is writing down my goals. When you have something to shoot for, your more apt to do the work to get there. So, without further ado, I give to you, my goals for 2009…

1. Get Car Club Union over 1000 daily unique visitors.

2. Increase my revenue stream to an average of $3000.00 per month.

3. Turn a profit of over $500.00 on an affiliate campaign.

4. Finish and launch my first e-book.

5. Launch three more e-books.

6. Get 100 subscribers to my feed on this website.

As you can see, I’ve set some concrete goals here. There is no grey area…I will either succeed or fail on each of them. Wish me luck! What are your goals for this year?

P.S. I just upgraded to Wordpress 2.7 today. Wow! Talk about improvement!