Features

• Choose what to cloak – all links, only the links you specify or no links at all.
• Choose where to cloak – posts, pages or both.
• Configure the URL – you can set the “prefix” part of the URL (see examples below).
• Exception list – links pointing to domains in this list will not be cloaked. For example, this is useful if you have chosen to cloak all links but don’t want to cloak the links to your own domains.
• Compatible with all browsers – the link cloaker plugin doesn’t use JavaScript so it will work even for visitors that have disabled JS.
• “Smart” cloaking – relative, ambiguous or malformed URLs will not be cloaked. Better safe than sorry.

Get it here

The RSS module is unfortunately useless for SEO purposes because search engines simply won’t “see” it. This Squidoo module displays the feed using JavaScript. As a rule, search engines don’t understand JavaScript and will not detect any contents in the RSS module.

I hope this helps clear some misconceptions about SEO-ing Squidoo lenses. Finding a relevant feed and placing a RSS module on your lens is still a good thing to do; just don’t expect it to help with your Google rankings.

Here’s a list of some of these sales-page techniques –

1. Shock Tactics And Insults (The Rich Jerk)
   “If you don’t buy my e-book you’re going to feel so stupid, you miserable, poor dumbass! Observe my ridiculous earnings and despair, ye frail mortals!” Et cetera. If you play this right, it can be very effective in evoking an emotional response (emotion -> action -> sales…?). It doesn’t matter whether the reader buys the product because of excitement and anticipation or because of greed and shame. Right?
2. (Unlimited) Limited Time Offers
   There’s nothing wrong with limited time offers as such – it’s a valid marketing strategy. However, I have more than once encountered pitch sites that say “this incredibly low price only available for the next XX hours!”. Maybe they even have a live countdown there or something. If you don’t buy it and come back a few days later… suprise! – “…for the next XX hours!” is still there, counting down to some arbitrary time in near future.
3. Out of Stock Downloads
   “Only 2 copies left!” Sounds kind of strange when the product being sold is an e-book or downloadable software. Not enough bytes left to reprint your product, eh?
4. “They” Don’t Want You to Know This…
   Then there are the “dirty secrets” and “killer techniques” that “the Big Canines don’t want you to know”. I mean, all of the “Top Felines” use them and I had to “practically steal” these pages of priceless information from them so I could sell them to you. I’ll even let you in on some “guru” tricks and give you the opportunity to “spy” on … stuff.
5. Metaphors And “Style”
   If a product is 98% similar to other products in the same niche or simply a retelling of well-known truths it can be hard to sell it. Then it’s time to give the product a unique style or brand. Sometimes the author/copywriter goes a bit over-the-top. I’ve seen Ninjas (more than once) and Space Monkeys being injected with cash. Lets not forget the outdated blackhat stuff. I wonder if zombies and pirates are forthcoming?
6. Is Product X a Scam?! (And The U-Turn Tactic)
   Often used to attract visitors to a review of some product, the advertiser initially creates the impression he didn’t like the product and later turns around and endorses it wholeheartedly. While it is actually possible someone disliked a particular product and became a convert later do to recognising the product’s true value, this is usually not the case with most of the reviews.
7. From the Desk of Jon Smith…
   I know, I know – giving the visitor a name improves credibility. Still, it’s not a damn paper letter. It’s not a letter at all! Letters are delivered to the addressee and, on some level, they are personal. The sales page on the other hand is publicly available and compels the faceless visitor to approach it.
8. This Is A Complete Success Blueprint…
   Enough said.
9. Bonuses Worth $1437.95?…
   If a product costs $47 and I’m also offered ten times more “value” in free bonuses I have to wonder if the product is really worth the price, or is it really worth anything at all? Or maybe the bonuses are worthless? Hmm?
10. Straight Out False Advertising
    I’m not going to look up the definiton of “false advertising” for you. Anyway, some sales letters make claims that are simply untrue. The infamous “Get Google Ads Free” e-book is an example of what could be referred to as a borderline case… maybe… if you’re feeling unusually lenient.

Here’s an amazing site that makes fun of some sales page cliches – Buy My Stupid Book.
And another one – ClickHereYouIdiot.com (not so funny yet interesting anyway).

By the way, if you’re looking for information on how to write a sales page, check out these copywriting resources.

Gravity: Number of distinct affiliates who earned a commission by referring a paying customer to the publisher’s products. This is a weighted sum and not an actual total. For each affiliate paid in the last 8 weeks we add an amount between 0.1 and 1.0 to the total. The more recent the last referral, the higher the value added.
(Description taken from Clickbank.com. Emphasis mine.)

So, if you’re a ClickBank vendor, why would you want to increase the gravity number? The answer is that many affiliates will check your product’s gravity and historical performance before deciding whether to promote it. Product’s with a decent gravity score, and – more importantly – a rising gravity trend – are more likely to attract affiliates. More affiliates => more sales => more profits for you!

So how do you go about increasing the gravity? Only affiliate sales influence the gravity number (see above), so you need to make sure that most of your sales come from affiliates. There are two main methods to achieve this :

1. Whenever you promote your product using PPC, forums, and so on, use your own affiliate link – you can get another CB account for free and use that to promote your hoplink. Note : If you have an opt-in form on your sales page – for a newsletter or something similar – don’t use your affiliate link in the e-mails, or you might end up robbing your affiliates of their rightful commissions.
2. Redirect those visitors that arrived without an affiliate id to your own affiliate link. It’s more complex than it sounds – you should do this redirect only once per visitor. Why? If a visitor originally comes through an affiliate link (no redirection) and doesn’t purchase the product immediately, instead bookmarking your page, he would be redirected next time he visited (through a bookmarked link with no affiliate id), effectively overwriting the previous affiliate id.

I’ve written a script that implements the second method. To use it, you’ll need some basic HTML knowledge and a web host that supports PHP. Here’s what you need to do :

1. Make a copy of your sales page. For example, if your sales page is called index.html, name the copy index2.html
2. Make sure the original file has a “.php” extension. If not, rename it so it does. For example, index.html => index.php
3. Replace the HTML code of the original sales page with the code below.
4. Edit the real_sales_page and your_own_affiliate_link variables to match your setup.

Redirection code :

<?php

	$real_sales_page='index2.html'; //your sales page copy
	$your_own_affiliate_link='http://affiliate.vendor.hop.clickbank.net/'; //your affiliate link
	$test_cookies=true; //true or false

	//-------------------------------------------------------------------------
	//           You do not need to edit anything below this line.
	//-------------------------------------------------------------------------

	if( ( isset($_GET['hop']) &&
		($_GET['hop']!='0')) ||
		( isset($_COOKIE['rdf_found']) &&
		($_COOKIE['rdf_found']=='yes')) ) {

		setcookie('rdf_found','yes', time()+60*60*24*90,'/');
		header('Location: '.$real_sales_page);

	} else {

		if($test_cookies){

			$script=$_SERVER["PHP_SELF"];
			if( !isset($_GET['ctest']) ) {
				setcookie('ctest','test', time()+60*60*24*2,'/');
				header('Location: '.$script.'?ctest=test');
				exit;
			} else {
				$cookies_enabled=$_GET['ctest']==$_COOKIE['ctest'];
			};

			if($cookies_enabled){
				header('Location: '.$your_own_affiliate_link);
			} else {
				echo 'cookies disabled.';
				header('Location: '.$real_sales_page);
			};

		} else {
			header('Location: '.$your_own_affiliate_link);
		};

	};
	exit();
?>

The above code also checks if the visitor has cookies enabled and will not redirect to your affiliate link if not. This is done to ensure it doesn’t mess with the supplemental hoplink tracking CB has recently implemented (if you want to know what that is, check ClickBank news).

I hope this information is useful to you

Unfortunately ClickBank allows you to sell multiple different items, but only gives you one hoplink URL per vendor account. To comfortably sell different products under one vendor id, you’ll need to use a trick or two. Read on.

ClickBank allows you to append additional data to the hoplink, e.g. “http://affiliate.vendor.hop.clickbank.net/?product=product2″. It is possible to write a script (a computer program) that will use this information to seamlessly redirect the visitor to a different site for each item.

Luckily, you don’t have to do that yourself – there are already several solutions available :

EasyClickMate
Okay, EasyClickmate has a lot more features than just selling multiple products using one ClickBank account. It protects your download page, calculates click and conversion stats, can notify you by e-mail when an affiliate makes a sale, increases your ratings in search engines, provides a back-end for your affiliates to check their own stats and more. It’s also easy to install, and the author can install it for you (for an additional fee). More info at EasyClickMate.com

CB Multi-Item Manager
If you think you don’t need all the additional features of EasyClickMate or think it’s too expensive, take a look at this multi-item manager – www.richwerx.net/cbmim.html. For less than half the price, it will also allow you to sell more than one product under one account, and includes a download protector as a bonus.

Personally I’d recommend using EasyClickMate, as many of it’s features are really essential to being a ClickBank merchant and you’ll wonder how you managed without it.

The simplest way to achieve that is to create a .html file containing this code :

If you want to redirect your domain to your affiliate link, name this file “index.html” and place it in the root directory of your domain.

Okay, the above code works – if you open the file in a web browser, you’ll see the contents of the site you put in place of “your_affiliate_link” and the address bar will show the URL of the file, not your affiliate link. The “?hop=” doesn’t appear, too. All good so far, but what if a web-savvy visitor decides to view the source of your cloaked page? He’d be able to easily find your affiliate link. Let’s fix this.

To make the cloaked link even more secure, it can be converted to “encrypted” JavaScript. Then the source code would look something like this :

Creating this cloaking code manually is next to impossible, so I suggest you use the free cloaked link generator I just added to CBTool.

So, you just learned another way to cloak your links, stealthily redirect domains and protect your affiliate commissions. I hope this information will be useful to you.

That’s all for today

You’ve probably seen links like these – mydomain.com/recommends/Product. Certainly looks better than an obvious affiliate link, doesn’t it? Numerous marketers claim that such cloaked links increase clickthroughs and are perceived as less ’salesy’ than standard links. Cloaked links also help reduce commission theft, as your actual URL isn’t in plain view.

Today I’m going to tell you about several ways to create “nice” cloaked links. To use them you’ll need a web host (preferably with your own domain name) that supports PHP and (for the more advanced kinds of links) mod_rewrite. Most hosting providers have these installed.

Creating a Simple Cloaked Link

The simplest kind of a cloaked link is a PHP file that redirects the visitor to your affiliate link. Start up your favorite text editor (Notepad will do) and copy & paste this code into it :
<?php
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: http://AFFILIATE.VENDOR.hop.clickbank.net/");
exit();
?>
Replace the link with your own and save the file as <someproduct>.php (use a descriptive name with no spaces and special symbols; example – CovertLinks.php).

Now create a new directory on your web server where you will store the cloaked links. Name this directory “recommends” (or use any name that looks good to you) . Put the file there, and your’re done! Now you can send people to your affiliate link by giving them the URL www.yourdomain.com/yourdirectory/yourfile.php

Creating Better Cloaked Links

The previous method requires that you create a new file for each link, which seems like unnecessary work. The link would probably look better without the “.php” extension, too. So, here’s another – slightly better – method.

You’ll need to create two files and put them in the “recommends” (or whatever name you used) directory. The first file should be named .htaccess and contain this :
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^([^/\.]+)/?$ index.php?site=$1 [L]
Next, create a file named index.php and put it in the same directory :
<?php
$links=array(
  'SomeSite' => 'http://affiliate.vendor.hop.clickbank.net/',
  'AnotherSite' => 'http://affiliate.avendor.hop.clickbank.net/',
  'YetAnotherSite' => 'http://affiliate.productx.hop.clickbank.net/'
);
if(isset($_GET['site']) && isset($links[$_GET['site']])){
  //site found - redirect
  header('Location: '.$links[$_GET['site']]);
} else {
  //site not found - send to an error page (or use a different URL)
  header('Location: error.html');
};
exit();
?>
There is a list of links in the code above, in the form name => ‘link’. What you need to do is place your links in this list. “Name” is what you’d want to write after “recommends”, and ‘link’ is, obviously, your affiliate link. Also note that after each entry there is a comma, except the last one.

After you’ve added your links and uploaded both files to your host, you will be able to use “nice” links in your e-mails and other promotions, like this –
me.com/recommends/xyz

You can later add new links just by editing the index.php file as explained above. You can also mix this method with the previous one.

Using CBTool “Nice Links”
CBTool has a “Nice links” feature that plugs into the keyword tracking script, meaning you will also know how many times your link was clicked. Unlike the previous methods, there is no need to edit any files – just download the script and place it on your server. New links are created as tracking campaigns in CBTool. Read the full description on CBTool site (you need to be logged in to access that page). At the moment this only works for ClickBank hoplinks. Oh yeah, I almost forgot – the CBTool service is free.

Using Commercial Redirectors and Link Cloakers

There’s a bunch of paid-for scripts and utilities on the market. Often all they have is a nice user interface built on top of the first two methods described above, possibly with database integration. One that caught my eye is the Covert Affiliate Links product, you might want to check it out.

In Conclusion
So, that’s one way of cloaking your affiliate links – using PHP scripts to redirect the user. These are often used to hide affiliate links in e-mails or redirect domains (just use the “simple” method, name the file “index.php” and put it in the root directory of your domain). Next week I’m going to discuss other cloaking methods – frames, encrypted JavaScript, and more – which are useful in different situations.
See you later