Protect Your Affiliate Links
I’ve just created a *very* quick video on how to protect your affiliate links using PHP.
I created this video because I was pitched a product today that was selling a program that automatically does this for you – for $19.99 or $19.97 … can’t remember really but, it was near $20.
It is so easy to do this yourself that I created a video for you showing you how. I was appalled actually that someone was trying to *sell* you this information.
So here’s how to protect your affiliate commissions from being stolen the *right* way.
P.S. If you can’t quite see the code that is shown in the video, I’ve placed it below for you.
1. Create a web page on your LINUX server that has a .php extension. Doesn’t matter what you name the page, just so long as you can identify it.
2. Within this new page, strip out all excessive code, the html, the body, etc. You don’t need this extra “stuff” in there for what we’re doing.
3. Put the following code on your web page AS IS with the exception of where it says “your affiliate link here”.
4. Be sure you place the ENTIRE URL including the http:// portion of your affiliate link here.
5. Save the file.
6. Point people to this page when recommending your affiliate products.
Let’s Talk People…about SPAM
Image via WikipediaYesterday I told you about a report that talked about the state of Internet Marketing called “Internet Marketing Sins“. Today, I received an email that had links to all of the hate mail (and fan mail) that Sylvie had received to date.
One piece of the hate mail talked about how they received a link to the report and considered the report “spam”. It was a very interesting read since this person not only talked about spam but also talked about the “noreply@website.com” that often came with these emails and how they felt that this in and of itself was underhanded.
This made me think a bit that there tends to be some misnomers and misconceptions about what is and is not considered “spam” and what the “noreply” actually means. So here’s a bit of what was talked about as well as my own take on the issues.
One thing that really, really gets to me personally is when people automatically mark a message “SPAM” simply because they didn’t find the email to be valuable to them at the moment even though they opted-in to the list in the first place.
The bottom line is, if you chose to subscribe to an email list by offering your name and email address, then the email you received is not SPAM and technically you’re not allowed to call it spam because you were the one who chose to receive it in the first place. Spam emails are those emails that show up out of nowhere from names you don’t recognize and where you know without a doubt that you never agreed to receive it.
Many if not all legitimate email lists, have a simple unsubscribe link at the bottom of the message that, in one simple and painless click can get you off of the email list. Just like that. No forms to fill out no questions to answer just a “click” and you’re off the list.
But don’t simply claim it to be spam because you’re too lazy to scroll down the email and click a link.
Secondly, something else that arose out of this back-and-forth that I read, was the matter of the “do not reply” when someone receives emails believing it to be somehow “fraudulent” or “underhanded”. Although it gets addressed perfectly in the initial response I read, I wanted to add my two cents to the pack.
First, I use “donotreply@website.com” for a couple of reasons:
A) I don’t want spammers getting a hold of my email address. Anyone in the world can double-opt-in to my list, and if my email address was just sitting there like a duck in the cross hairs, then I’d open myself to a whopping amount of spam email. I too get enough already.
B) As Sylvie says in her response, there are TONS of people who use an automatic responder when they’re on vacation, out for a week, on a business trip, or simply just to say “yes, I’m in the office today – if this is urgent, please call me at xxx-xxx-xxxx.” There are so many of these my server would get overloaded on a daily basis. No thank you. I do however, provide my contact information on my website if anyone cares to contact me personally.
These were just two topics that were mentioned in the hate mail she received over her report. I chose to talk about them as well because I fully agree with her on the issues of “spam” and “do not reply”.
If you’d like to read the hate mail (and the fan mail) feel free to do so. And if you haven’t read the report, you can do that for free here.
