- PayPal,
- E-Junkie and
- Clickbank
payments.

It’s called the WordPress Profit System and boy, DO I LIKE IT!

I’ve uploaded and activated this WordPress payment plugin, set my account info and quickly added a product with PayPal payment.

I then bought it myself and it worked superbly!

Want to see how it works?

Check it out!

Using this WordPress payment plugin is a snap and as easy as creating posts. And besides that, this plugin works in a secure way and your download links are protected!

I know lots of people using WordPress are having problems setting up a secure payment processor. If that’s you, pay attention, because here’s the solution for that problem.

Photo Credit: nateOne

I think anyone can do this, but just to be sure, here’s a rundown.

Installation:

• Upload and activate the plugin
• Fill in the standard settings
• Add a (hard to guess) download directory to the wp-content folder

Then this WordPress payment plugin is ready to work for you.
(There was a little flaw in unpacking the zip file, because it contained an identically named sub folder in the main folder. You have to get rid of one of them if that’s still the case when you download the product.)

Next, you’ll need to fill in your account info, like

• your PayPal email address and an authorisation code and/or Clickbank ID and secret code and/or E-Junkie Client ID
• your support info
• your download expiration time
• some random keys to encrypt your download page and link
• upload the provided .htaccess file to your download directory for extra security (I had to strip the rewrite url to index.php only)

That’s it.

Next, you want to fill in product details.

Before doing that, you have to create a thank-you and download page once-only.
You can use WordPress to do that or create a simple HTML page.
Samples of download and thank-you pages are provided in the package and the source shows the many variables that you can use inside these pages. Just copy and paste the source into your WordPress pages.

Then you’ll add the product specifications into the plugin, like

• product ID, description, price
• the selected payment processor (PayPal, Clickbank or even an affiliate program)
• the names of your sales page, download page and thank you page (just the names, no URL’s to store)
• the name of the download file
• email message to be send to your customers

Of course, for every product you want to sell, you’ll have to create a sales page and include the generated code for the payment button.

Watch the easy to follow overview video here.

Since I bought this WordPress payment plugin only yesterday, I didn’t have time to fully test it, but the first results are very promising, so there’s hardly any risk involved.

Also, this payment processor was suggested to me by Paul Myers and that’s one of the most reliable persons on the Web. Can’t go wrong with Paul.

That’s also the reason why I introduce this great plugin to you so fast. Don’t know how long this one will be for sale, so you’d better check it out fast. This is no marketing trick, as I don’t earn a penny promoting this great solution.

Here’s the page and there’s a good video on it to explain quickly how this payment plugin works.

If you need an excellent and easy to use WordPress payment plugin, get your copy right now. The price is ridiculous low.

Then post your comments below.
Do you use a wordpress payment plugin?

WordPress Payment Plugin – Easy and Secure is a post from Affordable internet marketing, http://www.affordable-internet-marketing.com by Case Stevens.

Officially called “Google Webmasters”, also referred to as “Google Webmasters Tool” or even “Google Webmaster Central”.

Whatever you call it, Google checker is an essential webmasters tool that also serves as a search engine optimizer. For the most important amongst all search engines: Google.

If you’re not familiar with Google checker, you absolutely have to use this online application to drastically improve your website.

Here are the basics of this wonderful webmasters tool.

Photo Credit: EvinDC

If you already have a Google account or use Gmail you just need to sign in and go to webmasters.google.com. Otherwise you have to register there first.

Then you can add your website(s) to the dashboard for inclusion.
Each added website needs to be authenticated (which is just to prevent identity theft, etc). You can do this by either inserting a line of code into your home page HTML or by uploading a unique file (generated by Google checker; just copy and paste) onto your website (using FTP). Either way is quick and easy.

Next, uploading an XML sitemap of your website to the Google checker is an outstanding idea. If you don’t know how to do this, use Google again to search for ‘google xml sitemap creation’. There are plenty of sites that can create such maps.
After you’re done, upload the map to your site as a page, but with an extension .xml instead of .html. Submit that URL to the Google checker.

Google thus knows the location of your web pages which helps indexing them.
Now that you’re doing this anyway, take some time to also create an HTML sitemap as well (again, use Google to find such a service), upload it as a (normal HTML) page and link to it from your homepage. This helps the other search engines, that don’t use the XML format, index your pages.

After you’ve done this, Google needs some time (give them two weeks, but you can check frequently) to crawl your website and gather data about it.
When that’s done, you’ll have tons of information from the most important search engine at your fingertips!

Some of the more important figures that you can find in the Google checker:

Site Configuration.
It’s very important to use the right settings for your site. You can manage a lot in here and it’s wise to spend some time figuring out how you want your site to be indexed.

Search Queries
This area of the dashboard reveals some of your main keywords for which Google is displaying your website to searchers. Ideally, you want to ensure that the keywords that you originally chose for your website feature in this list. If not, back to the SEO grindstone…

Crawl Errors
Crawl errors won’t do your site any good for search engine optimization, so you better make sure to clear this area up as soon as possible. If there are any crawl errors on your site, find out where they are, and adjust those links. If they’re coming from other sites, use 301 redirects.

Links to Your Site
This section contains an overview of internal and external links that Google has detected. Coming from Google itself, this is important information. Despite the fact, that it sometimes seems fairly inconsistent, Google usually seems to update these figures at least once a month. Your goal should be to try to grow this figure every month.

At the left side navigation bar, Google checker lists lots of other options, including diagnostics and crawl stats. Take some time to learn what these statistic mean.
There’s no better way to view your site than through the eyes of Google webmasters tool!

So, do you use this Google checker?
Post your comments below

Google Checker: Outstanding Webmasters Tool is a post from Affordable internet marketing, http://www.affordable-internet-marketing.com by Case Stevens.

I was looking for a service like that, because I got several emails about my annoying pop ups, when Instant Slide Ups offered me a review copy (disclosure!).
I took the opportunity with both hands.

Instant Slide Up is a NON-obtrusive, yet eye-catching way to get people subscribed to whatever you are promoting.

I use it to build a profitable email list.

There are many tested and proven ways to create a huge email list and one of them is using pop ups.

But when you use pop ups, hoover ads or lightboxes, your visitor is interrupted with whatever she is reading at your site, in order to get her email address.

That’s very annoying!

But it’s even worse: actually, you’re stopping her from discovering value in your content. She’s in the middle of a decision making process -one of the most difficult tasks for humans- and you’re interrupting her.

That’s not just annoying, it’s killing! Yet we use pop ups, because they work!
That is, their conversion rates are higher than any other way of capturing email addresses.
Still, I get a lot of emails asking me to stop these killing pop ups.

That’s where Instant Slide Up ads come in!
Here’s their main benefit:

Instant slide up ads do deliver the same results, however, your visitor is NOT interrupted as she still can read on. Yes, her attention is drawn to the movement of the instant slide up, but not in an obtrusive way.

If possible, avoid anything that annoys your readers. Pop-ups, pop-unders, lightboxes, hoovers and tons of animated subscription features will chase your readers away.
Mind you, they often work (depending on the niche you’re in), but they’re also a huge source of irritation. And that’s the last thing you want for your visitors, isn’t it?

The most positive benefit of Instant Slide Up is, that it draws attention in a positive way, which will more than likely increase sign ups.

The slide up ads are very easy to set up.
Just configure the details, embed some lines of javascript snippet into your HTML and you’ll see the nice slideup in your web page !

The ads come with numerous outstanding templates, so you can get started in minutes. And if you know a tiny bit about creating graphics, you can make your own template, like I’ve done below for this blog.

Instant Slide Up ads works seamlessly with your autoresponder system and you can either have your sign up form in the ad itself or have a link to your sign up page.
Heck, you can even split test that!

InstantSlideUp creator and owner Rob Chuah provides superior customer support. And not only that, his marketing skills are superior too as you will notice from his email tips and tricks that he sends after sign up.
Rob definitely knows what works and what doesn’t.

I am very satisfied using this email capture method, so I became an affiliate for the product and that’s why I use my affiliate link to send you there.

Sign up for Instant Slide Up ads right now -it’s very affordable-, or at least try the free version for a while.

Then, let me know what you’re thinking.
Post your comments below.

Why Instant Slide Ups Replace My Pop Ups is a post from Affordable internet marketing, http://www.affordable-internet-marketing.com by Case Stevens.

But soon after you start selling a few of your own products, you probably have to deliver support to your customers from time to time.

So, what do you do?

Right, on the download page you display your support email address and tell your customers to send a message in case anything goes wrong, right?

Then, after some time, you’re going to sell more and more and the number of emails you receive soon grow above your head.

Because there are not only support request, but also invitations for events, requests for guest posts, reviews and JV’s, and then, sometimes, even a friend wants to email you.

If you reach that point, you’re ready for some help desk management software.

Photo Credit: mrkumm

That’s the kind of software that makes you seen as a top professional by your customers.

Because having a well organized, fully automated, centralized and reliable customer support system ensures that every issue is handled as efficiently as possible.
And that on its turn dramatically improves customer gratification, commitment, and retention. It shows that you’re really interesting in helping your customers instead of only chasing after their hard earned cash.

As a spin off, your speed of resolving problems will increase, (staff) productivity will be optimized and you and your service pros, if any, will be more informed and responsive.
Also, you’re able to manage your time more effectively.

Great help desk management software should at least have the following items:

• Unique ticket tracking,

  necessary to identify support requests beyond any doubt and relate the request to the unique customer.

• Ticket categories / departments

  to separate and organize different websites, products or services and to possibly assign each request to individual staff members.
  The latter is often solved through email piping: certain problems are sent to certain staff members.

  This also includes setting ticket priorities to allocate your time more effectively and deal with urgent or emergency support requests first.

• Searchable client / ticket database

  to search through these for specific terms, or filter them by status and to build a history of archived closed tickets.

• A FAQ / Knowledge Base

  makes it very easy to supply and erase FAQ’s on your website and see how many times each entry has been viewed.

  That enables you to evaluate possible problems your customers have with your sites, products and services. It also may give an indication for new products.

Of course help desk management software should be able to send email messages, preferably personalized and features like follow-up satisfaction surveys and reporting / statistics are very welcome.

There’s a lot of software available, from free to a couple of thousands of dollars, from great to really worthless. In the past I’ve tried a few of them with varying success.

The one I like very much is Three Pillars.

Granted, I’m biased here. I’ve seen it being developed by my good friend Willie Crawford.
I saw how he desperately needed help and how he build an extremely practical help desk management software package.

Proof of this practical application is that a new customer doesn’t have to go through the boring procedure or registering (again) before submitting a ticket. She can do that right away.

So, if you need an outstanding help desk management software package, check out Three Pillars.

If that’s outside your reach, or if you just starting out, check out my simple starters help desk management software package.
Very simple to install script, for free!

Comments?
Post them below.

Help Desk Management Software is a post from Affordable internet marketing, http://www.affordable-internet-marketing.com by Case Stevens.

NONE were as simple to grasp and as easy to set up as the one explained in Membernaire, Jimmy Brown’s membershipsite help program.

Membernaire offers two HUGE benefits.

The first one is the ‘Fixed-Term Membershipsite’ which solves many problems and stressful efforts you’ll experience when setting up a good membershipsite:

- NO complex or expensive software needed,
- easy and fast to set up,
- no stress or pressure to create content in time,
- inexpensive to start and
- quite easy to retain members!

But that’s noting compared to the most important benefit of Membernaire, which makes it so outstanding…

All advices, remarks, strategies, techniques,
solutions, tips and tricks simply… WORK!

Because they come from an expert, Jimmy Brown, who has dealt with more than one membershipsite.

Nicheology is a great example, although not fixed term (Jimmy sold that one). Membernaire (which IS a fixed term membershipsite) is another one.

Membernaire is a step-by-step, 52-week training program for starting and running a successful membershipsite. The lessons, one per week, are delivered in an easy to download PDF format.

In each and every lesson, Jimmy basically:
- identifies a possible problem or ways to improve your membershipsite,
- explains the solution for that,
- give examples of his solutions and
- let’s you do it yourself at the end of every lesson.

And since Jimmy, who’s also a very smart online marketer, has a lot of experience with membershipsites, this course is not just about learning how to set up a membershipsite.

No, the main aspect of this course is that you get the experience of what works and what doesn’t and what all the pitfalls are and how to solve them before they occur. It doesn’t get any better than this!

The sales letter states that you can start a membership site (and be taking orders) in just 48 hours. I do not agree with that one.
Yes, you can certainly start BUILDING your membershipsite within that period, but you may not be able to sell it in that short period of time, as it may be too short to get the full picture of your site.

My guess is, that experienced marketers may need a week, maybe two, to oversee the full impact of their own membershipsite. And I strongly suggest that newbies better wait until they’ve studied the first 10 lessons as these contain the core basics of fixed term membershipsites.

Here’s an overview of the first 10 lessons:

• Lesson #01: How To Setup Your Own MembershipSite in 48 Hours or Less
• Lesson #02: FTM Quick Start 1 – Preparation
• Lesson #03: FTM Quick Start 2 – Presentation
• Lesson #04: FTM Quick Start 3 – Production
• Lesson #05: FTM Quick Start 4 – Promotion
• Lesson #06: The “Magic Sentence” That Keeps Subscribers Paying
• Lesson #07: How To Double Your Profit In One Easy Step
• Lesson #08: How To Keep Subscribers Active, Part 1
• Lesson #09: How To Keep Subscribers Active, Part 2
• Lesson #10: Turing On Your Built-In Profit Booster

Fifty two weeks certainly isn’t too long for a course like this, because you can build both your know how as well as your membershipsite itself ‘as you go’. You don’t have to finish the course before starting your site.

And cutting this course in weekly chunks makes it very do-able. It only takes half an hour to read the lessons, and another two hours on average to get your homework done (a bit more in the preparation phase). That’s not too much in a weeks time, it would be if the course consisted of only one Ebook.

Besides that, after you’ve set up your membershipsite, learning and practicing go hand in hand. You will learn ‘on the fly’ as you develop your site. And believe me, Jimmy is on top of every possible problem before you experience it. So you already know the solution before the problem occurs.

A great example I would like to mention is retention. From his own experience, Jimmy knows exactly when members tend to lose focus and unsubscribe. At the exact right moment, you’ll know what to do to prevent that.

Another important fact that Jimmy covers right from the beginning is… “Why You Should Never Cancel Your Membership”!
Just a few other important, typical membershipsite topics in random order:

• “Why You Should Never Cancel Your Membership”!
• “Getting New Subscribers Automatically”,
• “The Backdoor to Keeping Members”,
• “Getting 100 New Subscribers”,
• “How To Outsource (the whole membership if you wish!)”,
• “Getting All The Free Traffic That You’ll Need”,
• “Free Ghost Written Lessons”,

And of course there’s the ‘over deliver’ aspect that an expert marketer as Jimmy Brown wouldn’t omit from a course like this.
Over the year you will receive several extra bonuses for being a loyal member, like “20 Membership Site Ideas”. Believe me, when these suggestions come from and expert like Jimmy Brown, there’s money to be made.

As mentioned above, the fixed term membershipsite doesn’t require any membership script. Which is a big relieve, because selecting the right script for a site like this isn’t easy and almost always doesn’t fit the requirements for hundred percent.

This Membernaire membershipsite is capped at 1.000 members. I didn’t believe that at first when I joined Nicheology, but it was true: I went in just in time. So you’d better hurry if you want to be in Membernaire. It’s close to the limit.

I joined Jimmy’s Membernaire in December 2008 and enjoyed each and every weekly lesson. I still refer to them quite often, because of their huge value for creating and exploiting membershipsites.

I therefore wholeheartedly can recommend Membernaire. You’ll immediately receive your first lesson, so you can get started right away.

Let me know your thoughts.
Use the comments section below.

Membernaire Review – Membershipsite Expert Help is a post from Affordable internet marketing, http://www.affordable-internet-marketing.com by Case Stevens.

But that’s not where Clay’s career started. And becoming a broker in joint ventures certainly wasn’t what he intended to be. Read this amazing story, written by my friend Willie Crawford, in which he emphasizes that there basically are no excuses if you really want something.
Enjoy.
 
 

So What Is YOUR Excuse Again?

Copyright 2009 by Willie Crawford

In the world of internet marketing, there are really ONLY two broad categories of people… those who make excuses, and those who “find a way… no matter what”.

I think that I fall into the “find a way” category. As a youth, stuck in the cycle of poverty and welfare, I certainly didn’t see a clear path. I didn’t have any mentors or role models that I could conveniently hang out with. So, it took me over 20 years to figure out how simple success really is.

Another person who clearly fits in the “find a way” category is my friend Clay Cotton. Clay clearly validates that the excuses category really consists of people who CHOOSE to make excuses instead of taking action.

Yes, they chose it.

It’s interesting. Clay was a talented piano player who once ran with the likes of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and scores of showbiz legends. That is until the M.S. ended his piano playing in 1996.

Watch Clay Cotton Play Boogie Woogie Blues Piano Jazz

When that great “excuse to make excuses” hit Clay “Pow! Right between the eyes” he gravitated directly to Internet marketing where Clay and his wife, Kimberly, have made a modest living since 1996. Clay even taught from the stage in a wheelchair until 2002 at which point travel became too difficult.

You see, as a result of Multiple Sclerosis, Clay is now nearly a full-blown quadriplegic. And Kimberly cares for him, since he can do very, very few physical things for himself.

Recently, with health care costs ballooning out of control and mounting bills Clay sized up his situation and asked himself, “Good God, what can I do?” So he discussed these issues with several online friends, including me.

Clay agreed that there are tremendous assets which he still has, aside from his heart-warming, caring personality – A sociable nature, an active mind and an ability to talk. Clay is a giver. He enjoys people and has a natural talent with words, and for persuasion.

So last week on the phone, Clay joked that he is evolving into a genuine “talking head”, but then asked, “Seriously, Willie, how can I still earn a living?”

After some lively discussion, Clay decided that he could combine his “people” skills, with my Joint Venture Broker Certification training. He can be a match-maker, helping connect people in business. He can actually earn a good living as a joint venture broker, in spite of his physical challenges. “So cool…”, he whispered.

As Clay had already checked out the webpage describing my new JV Broker Certification program at: http://JointVentureBrokerTraining.org – But it hadn’t yet “clicked” until were together on the phone.

Now a joint venture broker simply connects product owners with joint venture partners and super affiliates who can sell a LOT of a given product. The broker locates ideal joint venture partners, and explains to them why it’s in their best interest to tell their customers about a given product.

A JV broker is paid a commission on the sales of joint venture partners they recruit, and sometimes an up-front fee.

Having spent many hours on the phone with Clay, there is little doubt in my mind that with just a little training, he will be a tremendous joint venture broker.

Clay gave this some serious thought, and I could hear the ideas percolating, then agreed, and he enrolled in my 4-week tele-training, as you very well may…

The point here is that Clay could have given up and felt sorry for himself, and nobody would’ve argued the point. But…

Clay Cotton obviously chooses not to make excuses! This is his chosen way, as I suspect it might be with you

Clay asks himself what he can do to take responsibility for his future. Pure and simple.

Then he takes action. Period.

Clay clearly belongs in our “find a way… no matter what” category, and you WILL be hearing a lot more from him over time.

If you are an affiliate marketer, at some point you’ll most likely have him contact you about a product which he brokers. And you’ll be glad you did…

So… What was YOUR Excuse Again?

—————–
Willie Crawford is one of the world’s leading joint venture brokers. As founder, and executive director of The International Association of Joint Venture Brokers, he helps set the standards for joint venture brokers worldwide. His course is at: http://JointVentureBrokerTraining.org
—————–

Post your comments below.

Amazing Story: How Clay Became a Joint Venture Broker is a post from Affordable Internet Marketing, http://www.affordable-internet-marketing.com by Case Stevens.

One of the beautiful things about RAP is its modular structure. Like WordPress and all of its plugins. RAP, like WordPress, is the basic module and the add-on’s are the RAP plugins. So, if you don’t need an add-on, there’s no reason to buy one.

The basic system of Rapid Action Profits on itself is very powerful. Read the features. I’m a happy user.

But the add-on’s are very powerful too!
Now there are two new ones from which you can profit tremendously: Paypal Subscriptions and Members Plus.

I’m not going to get into the exhaustive features which are fully listed on their product’s website, but what I am going to do is touch on it’s power, capability and flexibility for a moment by listing them brute force!

=============================================
This is BY FAR my EARLY Christmas Gift!
Make it yours too! Be one of the first 250 today!
=============================================

Think about how many membership sites out there are being created and used to create residual traffic. But you also might know that creating membership sites and the sales system to support it are very complex and require most to have an advanced degree in computer science!

These add-on’s make your life easy:

• Fully flexible, scalable, extendible architecture in the membership site itself.
• Exclusive protection of not only your content within your site but *** ALSO *** ability to protect your WordPress site, blog, or other secure areas, by just adding 3 lines of code – and NO complex .htaccess/code to use on your server!
• Extendibile Membership Site architecture allows you to put your own .php code, widgets, gadgets, content, and I’ve literally been non-stop thinking of how many different ways you could use this Membership Plus Add-On that it boggles the mind!
• You can use it to create your own Giveaway products… which auto-enters a transaction into the sales table for future use in your emailing your members/customers of your Giveaway.
• Comes complete with AJAX functionality for the Administration area, with convenient ‘one-click’ member features such as – “auto-login”, “password-recovery”, and (oh yeah) ‘one-click’ overriding access for a member (unlock/lock), and much more.
• No tweaking code, buying 3 pieces of software to do the work of one 5 minute setup!
• All built upon the highly scalable, dynamic, template driven sales system within RapidActionProfits.

Guess what? Works with WordPress perfectly!

Now, I must be honest with you and tell you that I haven’t installed the add-on’s myself yet.
And normally I wouldn’t endorse them until I have used them, but this is a bit of a time-sensitive situation. You see, I KNOW RAP (use it myself) and I do know Sid Hale, its creator. Reason enough to publish this post as I know Sid will go out of his way to help anyone using his script.

But there’s more. There’s a time limited offer to get all of the scripts for a low price. I don’t know for how long this offer will last -honestly, no marketing trick-, but I don’t want to take the risk of ending it before I am able to test the scripts. Hence, this ‘early’ post.

Check this membership package out. I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.
If you already own RAP, then use this link to get the add-on’s only.

And if you are clueless about setting up membership sites, check out J.D. Swansons flipping membership sites videos here. Again -no marketing trick- I don’t know when he pulls these outstanding videos, so be quick.
EDIT: JD pulled that video, sorry.

Let me know what you think.
Post your comments below.

Easy Membership Script is a post from Affordable internet marketing, http://www.affordable-internet-marketing.com by Case Stevens.

The first resource is the one that I use most: TextPad.
It’s a powerful, general purpose editor for plain text files. I’ve been using it for a while and was so happy with it that I took the paid version. It keeps the annoying pop ups away that appear on an occasional Save click.

TextPad comes with many features and the one I like most is the ability to wrap lines and split them at the desired length. That makes it very easy to cut each text line at 55 or 60 characters.

But there are many more, like a ‘Warm Start’ that lets you restart exactly where you left off, unlimited undo/redo capability and an outstanding and a very powerful search/replace engine using UNIX-style regular expressions.
I use the search/replace feature a lot, for instance preparing phrase and exact keywords for PPC campaigns.

TextPad has a tabbed interface, allowing you to work on multiple files at the same time. Frequently used combinations of commands can be saved as keystroke macros and the programs comes with a spell checker with dictionaries for 10 languages.

Easy to use, with all the features a power user requires. I suggest you give it a try.

The other valuable resource I use is MWSnap. That is a small yet powerful graphics program for snapping (capturing) images from parts of the screen.

With MWSnap you can capture the full desktop, rectangles or an active menu. The program handles 5 most popular graphics formats, from which I like the png format best because of the balance between quality and file size.
The software also contains several graphical tools: a zoom, a ruler (for measuring screen objects lengths), a color picker and a window spy.

MWSnap does not require installation and does not need any special dlls, drivers or system files which can mess up your system and probably therefore is very small. The available hotkeys make it possible to snap screen shots of menus with the cursor.

MWSnap is freeware (although the developer Mirek accepts your donations) and you wouldn’t expect that kind of quality from such a program. But it delivers.
Strongly recommended.

Those were my 2 valuable resources.
How about you? Do you have any?
Post your comments below.

TextPad and MWSnap: 2 Valuable Resources is a post from Affordable internet marketing, http://www.affordable-internet-marketing.com by Case Stevens.

…your affiliate ID is taken from the link, so you will not earn a commission. In that case, you definitely WANT to cloak your links, don’t you?

Another reason to cloak links is that you want to count how many people have clicked on them. Thus you can discover which links work well and which don’t.

Yet another reason could be, because your (affiliate) links are long and ugly. Especially when using them in text email they take a lot of space and sometimes break up into two or more lines.

So yes, there are valid reasons to mask your links.

Photo Credit: exfordy

There’s a lot of software available that can do the job very well, but there are also easy ways to cloak your links yourself.

One of the ways is to use a simple HTML redirect. You simply add the following line inside the <head> and </head> meta tags:

<meta http-equiv=”REFRESH” content=”0;url=http://www.the-link-to-redirect-to.com”>

Just replace ‘the-link-to-redirect-to.com’ by your link and you’re done.

IF you have log files available and IF they record access to such pages, then you have a counter too. That’s two ‘IF’s’ however.
Also, from the information I read from the SEO experts, this kind of link cloaking isn’t appreciated by search engines, because lots of people have abused this method.

You can also use Javascript to cloak your links quite easy. Here’s an example:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
<!–
window.location = “http://www.the-link-to-redirect-to.com”
//–>
</script>

This redirect doesn’t leave a single trace, but it’s hard to count clicks to this page.

The same applies to this link cloak in PHP:
<?php
header(“Location: http://www.the-link-to-redirect-to.com”);
?>

You can also use a htaccess redirect to cloak your links and even use a rewrite rule, but, although easy to implement, these solutions are too complicated for this post. I want to talk about an easier one.

You see, I use a simple PHP script that is very easy to set up. No PHP knowledge required. And it counts clicks! Nothing special, but it does its job very well.
Plus, and that’s another advantage of cloaking your links, if the page you’re referring to disappears from the Net, you can easily replace your cloaked link by another one!

Lots of these scripts use a MySQL database to store the information, but this one doesn’t. It’s a simple text file. No need to set up another database!
It’s a great balance between functionality and ease of installation.

Plus…
this script allows you to backup the text file containing your links from the screen, so if anything goes wrong, you’ll have a backup copy at your hard disk.

You can download your copy at PHP Click Counter. It comes with a very good user guide and again, is simple to install.

Don’t forget your security issues with regards to permission settings as described in WordPress Security And A Plugin To Help You

And you may want to add a rel=”nofollow” to all of your cloaked links, as the refer to your counter script, which is useless in search engines.

Other software that you can check out is Smart Links. It allows you to turn your affiliate links that nobody wants to click on, into cash-generating magnets.

Another piece of very interesting software that is worth checking out is Affiliate ID Manager. It’s a program where you can store and manage all your IDs, passwords, affiliate links and other relevant details in ONE secured software. All your info will be orgazined and available to you so you can concentrate on your work instead of searching for your missing links… This essential tool will save lots of time and money and comes with …..Master Rebrandable Rights !!!

You can try to find this software at Google or receive it completely free here.
(They are easy to find: after signing up, just do a search for the product name!)

So, how about you?
Do you cloak your links and if yes, how?
Put your comments below.

How To Cloak Links The Simple Way is a post from Affordable internet marketing, http://www.affordable-internet-marketing.com by Case Stevens.

If you’re not familiar with RAP, it’s an outstanding ecommerce script that automates front-end purchases, one-time offers, automated list building, affiliates and JV partners and a lot more. It’s the only script you’ll need, not only to sell successfully online, but also for affiliate management and follow-up marketing.

For a more complete list of features and benefits, read my post about New Rapid Action Profits Features (but don’t buy there, instead read on for a nice discount or click the banner below).

In the mean time, some great Add-Ons are added which makes the script even more flexible.

Since it’s RAP’s birthday, Sid is launching a special one-year anniversary discount of $47 off the already low price of this valuable ‘all-in-one-place’ script.

As of today. And since I had to disappoint many people about a special coupon that I once promoted earlier, I thought I’ll let you know about this great opportunity.

But, again, you’ll have to be quick. This discount only lasts a couple of days and I don’t know where we are right now in that period.

In order to profit from this anniversary discount, you’ll need a special link as I will show you below (or use the one with the banner).

I urge you to at least check out what this powerful software package can do. It will automate many, many steps in your e-commerce efforts.

To sweeten the deal even more, I will add my ACE Website Template as a bonus. That’s another $47.00 bonus added.

My website template is a very powerful resource to achieve high search engine rankings to make lots of money.

All you have to do is buy the Rapid Action Profits e-commerce script using this special discount link.

Then, after your purchase and download has finished, send an email to support AT affordable-internet-marketing.com with your PayPal receipt and I’ll get back to you with a download link for the ACE website template.

Don’t procrastinate. It’s for a very limited period only and you don’t want to be disappointed (again).

Rapid Action Profits Discount (Limited Time) is a post from Affordable internet marketing, http://www.affordable-internet-marketing.com by Case Stevens.