Now I don’t want to suggest that the premium plugin is not a good product. On the contrary they are often great products. I just don’t see the sense in paying for something when, with a little creative effort you can accomplish the exact same result, with the same amount of effort, and spend no money.

SEO Smart Links + Redirection = Cloaking + Click Stats

One of the challenges of affiliate marketers is to make sure they are not being cheated out of commission payments by people stripping the affiliate ID from your affiliate URL. The other big challenge is getting accurate statistics about your ads and offers.

This guide will show you how to get creative with your plugins, to do more than was ever intended with them, and save money along the way.

WordPress Plugins That Help Affiliates

SEO Smart Links is a WordPress plugin that takes any keyword or phrase and automatically converts it to a link. It was originally designed to provide a simple method to deep link to posts and pages within your own site. Using any word or phrase you can automatically create a link and point to a related post or page on your blog.

This all happens without the need to write out that url every time the keyword appears in a post. However SEO Smart Links can also be used to create dynamic links in your posts that point to your affiliate offers, using your own unique affiliate url.

Say you were promoting a Twitter ebook and you wanted every post that used the word Twitter to link to your affiliate page, you simply add the keyword, and your affiliate URL. Then each time a post uses the word Twitter, Smart SEO Links will create links to your offer.

As I mentioned there are several premium plugins designed to do this for you. These premium plugins have 2 main advantages over SEO Smart Links;

1. Provide on the fly cloaking of affiliate link URL’s
2. Provide click tracking on each dynamic link it creates.

Using the free WordPress plugin Redirection, you can achieve the same result. In other words, you can cloak and track with just a few mouse clicks. Redirection not only allows you to do the obvious, create a 301, 302, or 307 redirection without a redirect script, it also allows you to cloak your affiliate links as well as track clicks.

Go ahead and install both plugins then come back to this guide for the setup procedure.

Scenario

In this scenario I am going to be targeting the keyword windows and use my (fake) affiliate url http://microsoft.com. I’ll be cloaking the destination url with http://incomesinternational.com/windows.

Each time the word windows appears in a post, SEO Smart Links will create a link that points to http://incomesinternational.com/windows and when a user clicks the link Redirection will take to the Microsoft home page an track the click.

Step 1 – Create a Group

I like to keep things tidy so the first thing to do is to create a new Group in Redirection. Open your WordPress dashboard then click Tools, then Redirection. Once the screen is loaded click on Groups.

Choose a name for your affiliate link group and add the new group to Redirection. Ensure that ‘enable tracking’ is selected. In this example, my new group is called Cloak.

Step 2 – Create Keywords and Links

Now we are going to setup the keywords we want to target and convert to our affiliate links. Open Settings > SEO Smart Links. Take some time to get familiar with this very simple plugin. Be careful how many links you allow to be converted per post or your site could easily end up looking spammy.

Scroll down to the Custom Keyword section. This is where you add your keywords and cloaked URL. Add a new entry for each keyword or phrase you want to create links for. In my example I’ve added the keyword windows and the destination URL of http://incomesinternational.com/windows

Step 3 – Create a Redirection

Now we head back to the Redirection configuration page. From the main page, Redirects, select your group in the drop down list. In my example I’ll select Cloak, then click Go.

At this point you’ll see an empty list. So lets put in a new affiliate link.

In the section Source URL enter the cloak URL. You do not need to add the domain. So for my example /windows is all that’s needed.

Target URL is where you’ll enter your unique affiliate link. In my case it is http://microsoft.com. Once you’ve filled in the values click the Add Redirection button.

And that’s it! Your posts will now be automatically populated with your affiliate links wherever your keywords appear.

Don’t forget that you can review the clicks for each of your links from the Redirection page by selecting the group that you created. Clicking on the number in the Clicks column will show you a complete log of who clicked, and when.

You are now ready to replace all of your html or php redirects with this much simpler method of cloaking and tracking you affiliate URL’s. And why stop there, add the cloaking method to your banner ads or anything else you want.

Did this post help you? Would you like to see more like this? Tell me about it in the comments.

For years now I’ve been a fan and a student of Tony Robbins. I’m going to assume you already know who Tony is and what he does.

Most people mistake Tony for a motivational speaker. Truth be told, nothing could be further from the truth.

Sure, there’s no argument that Tony Robbins is probably the greatest motivator that ever lived. His seminars and courses explode with energy, and if you’ve ever experienced it for yourself, you’ll know that by the end of it you feel seriously pumped.

He’s touch thousands of lives and helped so many people to unleash their full potential. But in reality Tony Robbins is not a motivational speaker.

Tony Robbins is a life educator. While his style and methods are intensely motivating, the truth is that motivation begins within you. For proof of that just see how an 8 Year can give lessons on motivation.

What Tony does is put things in perspective. He educates and explains why you’ve been doing what you have up until now. He demonstrates how those decisions have been holding you back and most importantly, he gives you the information and the tools to be able to literally unleash the power that you already have inside of you.

Tony Robbins has been wildly successful over the past 20 years doing what he does best. So it would probably come as a surprise to you to find out that he has been a student of Frank Kern for a while now. That’s right the teacher has become the student.

Tony might be a fantastic speaker and educator but he has, up until recently, had no idea about internet marketing. He’s been learning the skills of internet marketing from Frank Kern and John Reese.

So during that experience, he was totally blown away by the awesome results demonstrated by so many of the internet marketers he’s been exposed to while working with Frank and has released a new course specifically designed for internet marketers.

He calls it the Money Masters Series and he’s offering a 30 day no risk, free trial.

I’m not going to try and sell you or pitch to you because, seriously, if you can’t see the value in a freebie from Tony Robbins then you won’t ever see the value in anything. I think you’d be freakin crazy not to take advantage of this but as they say you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.

If your serious about getting more from life, and getting more from your online business then get to the damn river and start to drink.

Go now and watch this video, listen to Tony’s message and if you like what you hear grab the free trial.

If you think that it’s not for you then at the very least you should follow this link and watch this video where Tony interviews John Reese and uncovers the whole story behind John Reese’s famous Million Dollar Day.

You might just be inspired enough to do something extraordinary and have your own Million dollar day.

If you (or anyone you know) want to break through your financial barriers …and shatter the obstacles before you, then this video will help.

Let’s see you become one of the New Money Masters!

That kind of makes Google search look like a 1st grader trying bully Mike Tyson. Chances are he’s going to get his ear bitten off.

So consider what that means to your business if you could tap into those 4.3 billion cell phone users? Getting in front of just 1% of all those users means you’re promoting to 430 Million people. On average that’s over 1 Billion views of your promotion.

There is clearly a massive potential to earn a huge amount of money promoting any type of product you like. What would it take, and more importantly, what would it cost you to get a billion clicks to your website with Google?

In reality you’d never achieve it unless perhaps you are a close personal friend of Oprah, and convinced her to promote your offer on her show. And still you’d be unlikely to get that number of views in a day, let alone do it continuously. But imagine being able to reach more than 4.3 Billion people with your message. How incredibly powerful would that be?

Well the times, they are a changin’.

Mack Michaels, the mastermind behind MaverickMoneyMakers has just released his newest, most exciting course to date.

Over the last 7 months thousands of people have used Mack’s coaching earning literally millions of dollars as members of his coaching club. And while those people were learning how to use his system to make money online, Mack was developing this new system of making money with cell phone marketing.

The system has now been perfected and Mack was able to generate $328,707 in just 1 month, simply by using these cell phone marketing techniques and in this new course, Mack will teach members exactly how to make insane profits from cell phone marketing.

I’ve included this sneak peek video so you can see what’s on the inside. I could have been sneaky like a lot of the gurus and placed an image here that directs you to the sales page but this course is so good (and I hate sneaky marketing tricks) that I wanted to show you the real deal before you head over to the sign up page.

There is no other course like this on the market, in fact this is the the very first of it’s kind. I want to give you the opportunity to get in on the ground floor.

In fact any make-money program on the internet today that talks about making money with Cell Phones, talk about only the iPhone. But Apple actually only holds an 11% market share. So that leaves 89% of the market untapped, and available for you to exploit.

International Cell Phone Market Share

Now you could be thinking that you’ve tried these types of things before and it didn’t make nearly the kind of money that you had expected. Well if you consider that if you only made 1% of what Mack is making, that still equates almost $4000 a month. That’s just insane!

We all know how quickly new marketing systems become diluted and ineffective so its extremely important that you take action right now.

The entire course is selling for less than $25, which I think is totally insane, but that means there’s absolutely no reason why you would not take advantage of this today.

As they say, the early bird gets the worm and that’s so true with new this release.

Head over to the site right now, read the sales letter and decide for yourself.

If you do or if you don’t makes no difference to me. Of course I’d love it if you did decide to go ahead and purchase through my link, and if you do, as usual, I’ll send you some bonuses that you can use to promote using the techniques that you learn in the Cell Phone Cash course.

But if you decide not to take advantage of this offer, you’ll be leaving your profits on the table for me and anyone else who uses this course.

Cell Phone Cash

Twitter can be a great tool to spread your message, build your brand, and promote your products but as I pointed out previously social networking needs to remain just that, social. Any other use and you’ll quickly alienate your followers to the point that either they take no notice of you or they unfollow you.

Of course there will always be some people who really don’t care about how to play the game nor how to get the most out of what they do. They don’t mind wasting their time.

So here’s 5 ways that you can waste your time and be certain you fail with Twitter.

1. Greet new followers with an automated message that includes an affiliate link.

I’m not anti auto tweeting but the fastest way to get unfollowed is to send a direct message to your newest followers with a promotion for your latest affiliate offer. Sure you might get a few donkeys who click on your links. You might even get lucky and sell something. I wouldn’t hold my breath though. About all you achieve doing this is coming off looking like an insurance salesman pitching your life insurance at my house party. FAIL!

2. Use multiple accounts and follow the same people on every account.

Obviously there are various reasons why you would use multiple accounts. But what’s the point of following the same people with each of those accounts especially if they are used for unrelated niches, products or purposes? It’s a great waste of time and likely to get all of your accounts unfollowed. FAIL!

3. Use an automated tweet system to send your affiliate links every 5 minutes from all of your accounts.

This one is my favorite. Particularly when combined with the #2 waste of time. You open multiple twitter accounts. You send the same tweets through all of your account to all of your followers. If you have say 5 accounts (which is pretty common unfortunately) and you are following the same people with all of those accounts your sending the same message 5 times to each of your followers. FAIL!

4. Auto tweet nothing but affiliate links all day everyday.

There are so many people doing this lately it’s almost become a joke. Social media is what the name suggests. It’s meant to be social. It’s a way to build relationships by being someone of interest or of value. Auto tweeting nothing but affiliate links is not social, is not going to build relationships, and provides no value to your followers. FAIL!

5. Try to come up with your own original quotes that make no sense at all.

Here’s an example of a tweet I saw today: “Do you realize if it weren’t for Edison we’d be watching TV by candlelight?“. Even a half wit can realise the redundancy of this. Watching TV by candle light? Seriously….and are we powering the TV with candles too? FAIL!

Twitter-Fail.com is great site that is dedicated to outing the absolute best twitter failures. Check it out to see if you’ve made the cut and been branded a twitter failure. (Thumbnail image is courtesy of Twitter-Fail.com.)

If you don’t want to waste your time then remember that social networking is a means to achieve the 3 fundamentals of marketing. That is to say that people buy from people they know, like, and trust. Twitter gives you the opportunity to become known, to show people that you are a likable person, and to offer some kind of value to your social group so that you can build trust.

Once you’ve achieved those things then you’re far more likely to sell you products, get retweeted, and gain more followers.

Although some times this will mean that building an affiliate business with a blog is going to take more work, the potential returns are greater. In some circumstances it’s more profitable than other business models. As always though it’s still to your benefit, as an affiliate marketer, to learn how to build a list.

Many people online are skeptical. Because there are so money making blogs already online, some people are worried about saturation. But in terms of potential customers, even more people are worried about scams and being taken. The truth is blogging can give you more credibility. The more credibility you have, and the harder you work to build a relationship with your readers, the more you will increase your earnings.

Building a list to make money with a blog means you are able to communicate with visitors who haven’t been back in a while. With traditional affiliate businesses, even though when you direct link to the merchant’s site a few will buy, the fact is most won’t buy, and you’ve lost that traffic. Plus, when you refer the visitor to the merchant directly, the merchant will get the visitor on their own list, and you lost your potential customers.

Blogging means you can pre sell well in advance of making a pitch. In many cases, with an effective promotion, a simple link at the end of a well targeted post is all you’ll need. Added to this you can communicate with a far wider audience through feeds and social media using much softer methods.

Selling multiple products will obviously increase your sales, so you need to be sure that you only offer the very best products to your readers. Your credibility rides on it and it’s my view that you should have at least sampled the product yourself. You could then use this to write reviews on the best of the best products online. We all know how much people love top 10 lists.

The biggest advantage of getting your readers onto your list is that these people are basically saying I want to know what you have to say. So you should see a far higher rate of clicks on your email stats and higher conversions. These potential customers are extremely targeted and wanting what you have to offer. The only important difference between targeted and non targeted traffic is your conversion rates. A targeted audience is much more likely to convert than a non targeted audience because you have usually pre sold them on your blog.

There are many theories about how to build a list. When it comes to blogging, the golden rule is simply to produce good content. You’ll engage your readers, they’ll get to know you well and be ready to listen to your advice. You’ll get far more signups to your list and the bottom line is your bottom line. You’re subscribers will be more interested in what you have to offer. Marketing your offers to people who are already interested in what you have to offer, and people who know, like , and trust you then you’re more likely to make a sale.

I’ve read many books and articles on list building. I’ve even spent several thousand dollars trying out several different courses and the best one I’ve used to date that works for bloggers, traditional affiliates or any business trying to make money online is The List Building Club. The material is well made and easy to implement for anyone at any level. The site is a little disorganized but who honestly cares much about that. Tellman Knudsen and his staff do an excellent job. Tellman himself is a pretty way there kind of guy but he’s a wizard when it comes to list building.

If you need to learn how to build a list effectively then these guys can teach you everything you’ll ever need to know. The List Building Club

Don’t believe me?

Take a look at all the things you’ve been doing so far and ask yourself if, based on your current results, you honestly expect to see any immediate results. What about even just marginal returns in the next 12 months. The answer is more than likely a resounding no.

Did you buy into a program that promised to teach you how to make a fortune in 30 days or less? You’re not alone. And that’s exactly what the gurus want you to do because that’s how they’re making all that money that their sales letter sold you on.

The truth of the matter is that unless you started affiliate marketing at the beginning, I’m talking around 10 to 15 years ago when the industry was new, then less than 1% of you will ever have a chance of making it because the information your buying into is ancient, out of date, and plain useless.

Everything related to technology moves and evolves at a rapid rate and affiliate or internet marketing is no different. What worked 5 years ago is going to be next to useless today. Buyers have become more educated and today they opt in far less. That means lists are harder to build and, lets face it, without a good list, who are you going to market to?

You’ve probably heard of people like Frank Kern, Perry Belcher, Jeremy Shoemaker right? These people all have 1 simple thing in common and that common thread is why they are super affiliates today.

What is that common thread? They all started with affiliate marketing at the very beginning, years ago, before anti spam legislation, before buyers became educated to online marketing techniques, and before there was so much competition.

But there is a way out, though it takes time, effort and perserverence. Most importantly though it takes courage. Courage to do the things that no one else is doing. Courage to stand out from the crowd and try new things. Dare to be different.

Take twitter for example. How many times a day are you spammed on twitter by ‘the next big thing’ or ‘its so easy to make money with this system’? I know I am and as soon as I see them I very quickly unfollow. Why? Because these are the jerks who can’t think outside the box, they follow like sheep and do whatever anyone else is doing.

But there is a way out and social networking is your savour. The only problem now is how to use effectively. Do you use your facebook and twitter accounts to try and pitch your latest affiliate link or program to? And considering that’s what 99% of affiliate marketers are doing how long do you think you will last?

Social media is not the place for pitching your affiliate links or for pitching your latest ebook. That’s what your blog is for. If you are going to use your social media outlets effectively then you need to stop pitching. What you need to do is start building relationships, building an audience, building a following.

Stay focused on the fact that it’s “social” media. Think about this for a moment. If you went to a party and as soon as you walked in the door you started to try to sell your products to everyone you spoke to. How well do you think you’d do? You’d be comitting social suicide right? The same goes for online social media.

The bottom line is that if you don’t start to think about how you use your social media and continue to be the ‘a-hole’ of the party you’ll never make a single penny with affiliate marketing. If people buy from people they know, like, and trust then the guy who is constantly pitching product at the party is neither liked nor trusted and no one will ever take the time to get to know them.

In today’s online world if you want to be successful then get your head out of your ass, quit spamming social media and get back to basics. Learn how to build relationships, let people get to know you, be likeable and be helpful. Only then will they want to listen to your pitch and be pursuaded to spend money with you.

Do you want to be the guy at the party who everyone talks about a week later because of how cool you were, or because you were the asshole who tried to pitch some crappy product to everyone you saw?

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

For those of you who are not familiar with it, Affiliate Marketing is simply the process of advertising and promoting other people’s products and earning a commission for doing so. Whether you realize it or not if your running Google Adsense on your blog then in reality you are already affiliate marketing.

You promote Google’s Adwords campaigns on your blog then you get paid for each click. Adwords is not your product, nor is the product being promoted in the advertisement. You earn a commission simply for the promotion.

Affiliate marketing works exactly the same way except that you promote individual products and generally receive a much higher commission (than adsense would pay).

Depending on the product that your promoting you might get paid once for each sale or you might earn a recurring commission if the product has a re bill such as a monthly membership site. Commissions can range from as low as a few dollars up to hundreds or even, in a few cases, thousands.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

Once you sign up to an affiliate program you are supplied with you own unique link. Simply explained, that link will have a special tracking code embedded into it so that every click on your link can be identified. When a person uses your link to go to the sales page, the tracking code is used to identify that you were the person who directed the visitor to the site. If that person then goes on to buy the product it is recorded against your affiliate link and you earn your commission.

There is usually some criteria, such as minimum payment amounts, and payment cycles that you must reach and then you get paid. Usually these payments will be made directly into a PayPal account although some programs will send you a cheque in the mail.

There are several approaches that you can take with promoting affiliate products. Traditionally these promotions are done using PPC campaigns like Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing. This is a very popular and successful method of promoting affiliate products.  Many millionaires have been created using PPC alone.

The real beauty of this is that you don’t need anything at all to get started other than a PPC account. No website or domain name, and no other effort on your part aside from creating great ads that are well targeted.

Marketing to a list is a much more dependable method though but it takes more effort and more time to get established.

Using a list however provides several benefits the least of which is that you quickly get to know what your subscribers want by analyzing your sales figures, click and conversion rates, and a range of other data. You can focus your promotions to suit your list and achieve better conversion rates. That simply translates to more profits for you.

Finding products to promote is quite easy. There are a large number of affiliate programs such as ClickBank that provide a common market place for affiliates and product vendors to come together to sell and promote products. However do be careful because there is a lot of crap out there and if you promote crap to your visitors and subscribers you can kiss them goodbye forever.

I’ll be writing a more in depth article taking a close look at the 3 most popular affiliate programs so keep an eye out for that.

Personally, I will only promote products on my blog that I have either used, or have some other kind of direct experience with so that I can be certain that the people who do buy, based on my recommendation, will be happy customers.

How Affiliate Marketing can help my blog?

Through effective, subtle but persuasive sales copy, you can simply promote products directly from your blog. You can write an honest review or other type of post about a product you want to promote. You would then use your own affiliate link and direct your traffic to the sales page. You’ll get paid every time someone buys that product.

The real power, as with most models of online marketing, promoting to your list. If you want to monetize your blog, then you MUST learn and become a master at list building. You really need to get your head around this.

Once you start building up a good size list you can promote the product directly to the subscribers via email. If you have a good list that you have spent time building a solid trust based relationship with, they will be more likely and more willing to purchase products you recommend, than other random visitors to your blog site.

Consider that hypothetically your blog receives 5000 visitors per month. You also have a list of 5000 people. Which one do you think will get a higher share of sales? The blog review, or the direct email?

You’ve heard of the super affiliate right? They exist because they have built big lists, full of people who will pretty much do what ever the affiliate asks them to because they trust the advice they are being given. The art of list building is a topic all on its own but you should understand that if you’ve decided that you want to monetize your blog through affiliate marketing then you need to start building your list.

All you really need to begin building a list is a landing page and an auto responder. But you should integrate them into your blog as well. You can get your auto responder started with an Awebber account here, and get a hosting account with HostGator.

If you really want to learn to build a list from a master then you should take a look at The List Building Club. You’ll find out everything you’ll ever need to know to build a super list that converts. I’ve been a member there for a while and its a great resource no matter if your just starting out or you’re an experienced affiliate already, I am certain everyone can learn something at The List Building Club.