Affiliate Link Cloaking

In the world of affiliate marketing where you refer somebody to a product through an affiliate link, and if they make a purchase you get paid commission, common affiliate revenue theft occurs.

Affiliate revenue theft, how is this so?

Well here’s the thing, people started to catch on to affiliate marketing and started to become aware of it, and its “affiliate links”.

For some reason people rather pay the owner of the product directly then let someone else earn a profit from it as well (like it makes a difference . . . go figure). Even after a well thought out review was written by the person the product was recommended by.

This person helps you decide if you’re going to buy something or not, and you decide to bypass their affiliate link and give the money straight to the owner of the product.

Why? Who knows?

You’re not giving any more money up. It’s the same thing. My way of looking at it is, why feed one mouth when you can feed two? So yes I click and make purchases through affiliate links because it’s the same either way.

The same amount of money is going to be spent.

Well it just so happens not everyone thinks the same way, so people began to anchor text their links instead (aka make the link a descriptive text), in effect hiding the URL and not displaying it directly.

This didn’t work very long.

What happened?

People started to catch on to another flaw: the status bar, and it’s at the bottom left hand corner of you browser’s window.

Every time you hover your mouse over a link the URL of such link will be shown in the status bar revealing your affiliate link. Again affiliate sales begin to be cut due to the bypassing of affiliate links.

What was the solution?

Well some savvy programmers came up with something called a link cloaker.

This “link cloaker” lets you “anchor text” your affiliate link, and makes sure it doesn’t show up in the status bar whatsoever. This will make sure that your affiliate sales continue to flow in and that nobody is bypassing your affiliate links.

But there’s a catch

I wouldn’t recommend you use this if you’re serious about the site you’re using it on. By “cloaking” links on your site, your site can lose its credibility. It is non user-friendly to have readers click onto the unknown.

If you’re going to use it remember it can damage your credibility.

Proceed at your own will . . .

To use this tool just click on this link Affiliate Link Cloaker.

2 Ways To Backup Your WordPress

I can’t tell you how many times I’m on a forum, and I read threads of people freaking out because their entire sidebar is missing (or something along those lines.) I’ve been a victim of such incidents myself; this is why I can’t express enough how important it is to backup your blog.

Just imagine: you go to add a new AdSense code or change a banner, and you accidently erase a <div> tag but you don’t notice. You hit save, view your blog and 1/3 of the page is blank! If you’re not familiar with html, php coding and all that good stuff, it’s going to be while for you to determine it’s a <div> tag your missing let alone where to place it.

Save yourself the hassle and backup your files. If you make a mistake, then poof voila! Back everything up again and it’s all brand new. So here’s 2 ways you can backup your WordPress.

1.) The WP export Feature

Now this feature that already comes in your WP’s dashboard is great if you just want to quickly back up all your posts and pages. You can simply go to your dashboard under “Manage,” then click on “Export” and finally, choose the Author’s post you’re exporting and download the file. You can later go back to your dashboard under “Manage” - “Import.”

2.) WordPress Back Up Plugin

This is the way I do it. With this plugin you simply download, upload, and activate like any other plugin. Then go to the menu, which you can find by going to your WP dashboard and clicking on the “Manage” tab. after that a subtab will come out and you will then see the tab: “Backup”. The plugin automatically selects all default WP files (tables) and gives you the option to select anymore it might find. You can even schedule the plugin to back up your WP under an hourly, daily, or weekly basis.

You can get the plugin here WP Backup Plugin

These are two simple ways for you to backup your database incase anything goes wrong. Even if you feel you won’t make mistakes, servers crash, people get hacked. This is why no matter what you should always backup your database.

Split Testing Your AdSense Ads

Hey everyone today I want to shed some light on AdSense ad optimization tactics. Google AdSense is the largest, most popular pay per click network to date. Others beg to differ, but stats rank it on top, whether or not someone thinks there is a better pay per click network is their own opinion. Ad optimization is very important. Simply trying to place ads in the places they “look” the best won’t do the job. Just because an ad looks pretty in a certain spot and makes you some money doesn’t mean that it’s the BEST spot, or the spot that can generate the most income.

Another variable responsible for how many MORE clicks you get, can be the ad unit size and color. In my opinion (and many experts agree) it’s best to have an ad with no border that blends with the background of the site, as well having the links on the ad be the same color as the links on the site. A very big variable is location - whether the ad is in the content, header, sidebar, or footer of the site. A mix of all these characters is what can determine which ads generate more clicks. Give all your ads channels, then collect and analyze all date retrieved.

A speedy process to testing different ads in the SAME location to save you time, is displaying 2 different ad units in the same spot - one showing 50% of the time and the other showing 50% of the time or whatever you desire.

How can you do this? Well let’s all thank Darren Rowse from ProBlogger for providing us with a very helpful script that can help you test and compare your ads faster then you normally could.

The best way to do this is to test the same size ad unit but with different color schemes to see which gets a higher CTR (click through rate.)

It’s called A/B testing. Here’s the code you need to do it.

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var random_number = Math.random();
if (random_number < .5){
//your first ad unit code goes here
} else {
//your second ad unit code goes here
}
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js”></script>

note: you need to replace the bolded lines with your 2 different AdSense codes.

Place this in your template in the spot where you want the ads to show and rotate. This will allow you to rotate 2 different ads, one will be shown to one visitor and the other will be shown to the following visitor- 50/50. If you would like to change this and show a new ad less/more simply adjust the “.5″ in the code which represents the % of how often the ads are shown, i.e if you want your new ad your testing out to show 60% of the time you would change it from .5 to .6 - Something else you might want to do before selecting your ad code is giving each ad it’s own channel, so you can track which ad is performing best.

Doing this greatly benefits you in determining which ad unit will do better for you. This also saves you a ton of time and prevents you from having to go back and forth all the time. It practically automates ad testing.

Remember to back up your templates in case you make an error,so you can quickly revert back to the way it was before. Hope you guys discover which ad makes the most money for you, put it to use it’s definitely worth figuring out!

Top Ways To Make Money From Your Website or Blog

In today’s post I’m going to include the top ways people earn money from their website or blogs. There are many ways to earn money, and in this post I am going to attempt to list and explain the top money makers that are worth using.

PPC Advertising - is probably the first one that will pop in your head. PPC advertising for those of you who don’t know is when you display an advertisers ad on your site or blog and get payed “per click.” Every time someone clicks on an ad you get paid. You can join several PPC networks and start making money by simply placing the code on your site.

Here Are Some of My Top PPC Networks

Google AdSense
Yahoo! Publisher Network
BidVertiser
Chikita
Clicksor

Text-Link-Ads - is another great way to make money from your website or blog, or should I say was. After Google started to penalize sites for selling text links without the no-follow tag, text-link-ads became less popular. However many webmasters still use text-link-ads and make a very good amount of money from them. Some follow the rules, some don’t but it works for both parties. ( I encourage my readers to follow the rules!)

Here Are some great Text Link Networks

DigitalPoint Link Sales Forum
Text-Link-Ads
Text-Link-Brokers
TNX
LinkWorth

Monetization Widgets - these get more and more popular everyday. These widgets allow you to make money from your website under pay per click basis, some even work with affiliate links. The good thing about this is that they are widgets and are easily applied to your website or blog to make you some money.

The Following Are The Best Widget Monetization Networks

WidgetBucks
ScratchBack

Affiliate Networks - one of the easiest and fastest ways to make money online, works kind of like PPC only a purchase has to be made in order to be paid, and pay is based on a predetermined % by the owner of the product. These things are best handled through affiliate networks, where the affiliate network plays the middleman between affiliate sales and payment method, as well as for the owner of the product.

Here’s Some of The Best Affiliate Networks

Commission Junction
Clickbank
AzoogleAds
Linkshare

Sponsored Reviews - Sponsored reviews is when someone pays you money to write a review on their website, blog, or product. Now this is truly a great way make money from your blog and provide your readers with a useful resource all at the same time. PayPerPost originally came out with the idea and then many other companies followed with a better formed model for payment and such.

If your website has a large audience you can offer a paid review directly and cut-off the middle man fee.

Here is a List of Sponsored Reviews, Paid Blogging

PayPerPost
ReviewMe
Sponsored Reviews
BlogVertise

Donations - this is an honest and a very good way of making money online, that is if your providing good quality content to your readers. Having a more personal feel on your blog in my opinion drives much more money to the donations box. A lot of people use this method of monetization for their website or blog, it’s mostly popular for people who offer something for free and do not charge for their service. You can simply place a link to your paypal email for payment.

If you want to be more creative there is a plugin called “Buy me a Beer” this neat little plugin allows you to place a link under each post or on the sidebar if desired, asking the reader if they liked the post why not buy them a beer? And it comes with a neat little beer mug full of beer icon. For those of us that do not drink there is an option to change it to coffee. I feel people are more likely to donate more using this as it comes off kind of humorous. (at least I think so.)

Here’s The Plugin

Buy Me a Beer

Sticking to just one method of monetization is not very effective. The proper mix of money makers on your site, depending on your nice is what can help you earn the most your blog is able to. Some people stick to just AdSense and don’t realize all the money they are losing out by not looking into other methods of monetization.

Stay tuned I’ll be posting more ways you can monetize your website or blog.

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