PHP is a scripting language that is very common in web development. PHP originally meant Personal Home Page, but soon changed to – their is no way I will bore you anymore with this stuff! All you need to know is that we can use PHP to redirect our article links to affiliate products;)

What’s A Redirect?.

You walk up to your favorite store to try and enter, but notice the sign on the door telling you that they moved down the street, so that’s where you head toward.

A PHP redirect for websites work the same, you may lead people to your site via a link, but when you insert some simple PHP code, once they get to your site they are immediately sent to another website, your affiliate products website.

Why Do I Need To Redirect?

Some article directories I’ve been using will not allow you to link directly to your affiliate sales page, so I thought it might be a good idea to share with you the method I use that allows me to link to an affiliate product, and does not take hours or lines of code to pull off.

This is what EzineArticles require…

EzineArticles.com Editorial Guidelines: (AFFILIATE PROGRAMS):

Affiliate links will be allowed if the link is a domain name you own which forward/redirects to the affiliate link from the top-level of the domain name. For example, it is permissible to forward to an affiliate link from:

http://your-company-name.com/

…but it would not be permissible to forward to an affiliate link from:

http://your-company-name.com/page.html

http://your-company-name.com/subdirectory/

http://your-company-name.com/subdirectory/page.html

http://sub-domain.your-company-name.com/

Any article with an affiliate link that does not adhere to this guideline will cause the article to be rejected.

Also ArticlesBase will not allow direct affiliate links within articles posted on their site, how rude! GoArticles on the other hand does;)

How Do I Redirect?

Let’s get started.

I have a site that I use all my redirects on, this is an example of my redirection process. This would be my site….

www.redirectmephplease.com

Now if I sent someone to that site via a link as it is now, they would just end up at the site above and nothing would happen. But if I add some PHP code into the index file of that site with my affiliate link included, as soon as the visitor hit the site above they would then be redirected to my affiliate page.

Here is the code…

<?php
header(“Location: http://www.myaffiliateproduct.com/myaffiliatetrackingcode”);
?>

Just three lines of code!

If you understand what and where your index.html file is, then all you need to do is add that code above (with your own affiliate link included) into your index.html file BUT……… rather than save that file as a .html file, you need to now change it to .php -> index.php and not index.html and save it.

To make it even easier for you…

<?php
header(“Location: PASTE YOUR CLICKBANK LINK HERE STARTING WITH THE HTTP:// “);
?>

Just paste in your Clickbank affiliate link into the section in bold above removing everything from PASTE, right up to, but not including the “); <- leave that part where it is.

So you should now have a file called index.php with only the three lines of code above in it.

But Can I Only Use One Redirect Per Article Or Website?

Well yes and no. Using EzineArticles you are only allowed just one redirect, and it must come from your main top-level domain, which would be…

www.redirectmephplease.com

But because we added that index.php PHP redirect code above, this would now divert people to your affiliate link which is what we want, but then if you decide to write another article using Ezine, then you have to add that PHP index.php redirect file to anther one of your domains using the same process!!

However if you use ArticlesBase you can use more than one redirect per domain. I hear you saying “Yes, but we just used our index file to send people somewhere else, how can we use another?” My method here is to add a new folder to my site.

Like this example…

www.redirectmephplease.com/articletwo/

So I added the folder articletwo and uploaded it into my public_html directory for that domain. Remember to use a new folder, and not just a file. Using a folder means we can again use our redirect index.php file but this time with a different affiliate link included.

Like this….

www.redirectmephplease.com/articletwo/index.php

You can do this time and time again making sure every time you write a new article, you add a new folder and a new index.php file.

Tip Time – I always name my new folders using my main keyword that I’m targeting for that article, so if I was writing an article that targets the keyword-> fuzzy ferrets <- then the folder and redirect link I would create would look like…

www.redirectmephplease.com/fuzzyferrets/index.php

I do this for SEO purposes myself, but you can name your folders whatever you want, even fuzzy ferrets;)

Where Do I Paste My PHP Redirected URL?

Now you have it saved on your domain always check to make sure it works by redirecting you over to your affiliate page, if it works then you can get started adding this link into your articles.

Some article directories only allow you to post just one link in your author bio at the end of your article, but others will let you post it where you want, whatever one you use just make sure you read the guidelines so that your article does not get rejected.

Another thing to take notice of is that if you can use keyword links in your article rather than just pasting the entire link in like this..

http://www.redirectmephplease.com/fuzzyferrets/index.php

Instead you might be allowed to use a <a href> like this…

<a href=”http://www.redirectmephplease.com/fuzzyferrets/index.php”>Fuzzy Ferrets</a>

I colored the link that people will see if you can use a <a href> in blue, because that is what they will only be able to see from that code above, which is also great for SEO by being able to use you main keyword in the link text.

Hopefully that cleared up using a PHP redirect to link to your own affiliate products in articles, the good thing about this php method is that it’s very simple to repeat many times over. However if you have questions or get stuck please let me know below and I’ll do my very best to help you through it.

Still without a sale yet, but I have just completed my 20th article which made this weeks article goal! I’m actually finding it easier to write the articles the more I do of them, however it does help a great deal if you have knowlege, and are passionate about the subject you write about.

I found a CPA offer I will be matching to a few keywords that I can base more articles on, these keywords are long tail but still have a decent amount of traffic if I hit the top spots in the search engines.

One of my articles has hit number one in Google so im starting to see an increase in traffic to that article, which will hopefully mean some sales this week?

I now plan on taking an in-depth look at why this particular article hit number one, if I can get a method together that I can repeat over and over, then I just need to find a similar article/keyword/competition combination and repeat it again.

My main aim is to get a few consistent sales from an article, once this is achieved I will then create a website around that particular articles topic, and continue to write content for the website hoping to gain high listings in the search engines for the same converting keywords.

As soon as the website starts to make consistent sales I will then carry on writing even more articles, but this time rather than point links to the vendor page, I’ll instead point them to my site which I can then use to get customer emails and start to build, and sell to a list instead.

But for now I’m concentrating on getting my first sale in this ongoing project. Another 20-30 articles is my aim for this week!

13 articles live so far with  a couple still pending. Altogether the articles have about 136 views so far but no sales as of yet. My highest ranking for one of the articles is up at number 2 for the phrase match on that keyword, so I’m hoping to see an increase in traffic for that over the next few hours or so.

I’ll be writing more articles and gaining links to them over the course of the next couple of days, hopefully by Sunday I can hit about 20 articles this week along.

I’ll keep updating as much as I can!

Here is a sorry sight for your eyes, and to also show that I have some work ahead of me to make the new affiliate challenge I set for myself yesterday. That picture is from my Clickbank account, nothing to write home about huh:)

After I finished the post yesterday I went on to write 4 articles on some Clickbank products I had in mind. I picked the products based on the fact that they converted in PPC, and as I cannot use PPC anymore I wanted to give them a try using only free traffic methods.

I’m going to start with 5 products, 2 from clickbank, 2 from plimus.com, and a CPA offer via PepperJam.com. Again some of the products were selected because of a successful PPC campaign in the past, and a couple of others I researched into them and decided that they too had a really good chance of converting.

The articles will be based around keywords for that product, each one will be 100% original and written by me only. I started with ArticleBase and GoArticles because they seem to publish your articles so much quicker than EzineArticles, but I do have a few articles waiting to be published with Ezine. It will be interesting to see how it turns out.

Because I am aiming at writing a lot of articles, I wanted to make sure that the product selection I am going with is at least enjoyable to write about, I also went with products I had some general knowledge in as well, this will cut down on research time and any other fact finding issues.

Three articles went live yesterday so I’ll spend some time working on some back-links to each article, just making sure I spread out the link love over a period of time, and not bring them all in at once.

I made sure I selected the keywords correctly making sure there was not a great deal of competition, but also that the keyword did have decent traffic all at the same time. Long-tail keywords will be mostly used in order to try and grab some top listings in the search engines, so I can eventually grab that traffic for free!

Target: $200 per week

Deadline: December 31st 2009

$$ Per Day: $29

$$ Per Hour: $1.21

NO PPC!

What’s my Plan?. Because I cannot use PPC for this challenge everything I attempt will have to be 100% FREE! So here is an outline of what I’ll be trying out.

Article Marketing

Classified Ads

CPA Offers

Blogging It Up

A big part of this challenge will fall to article marketing. I’ve never really done a lot with articles, I have written a few but never really concentrated too much on it. So this challenge is going to change all that I hope.

What I would like to do is write about 10-20 articles a week, and try out as many different article sites as I can, at least the most well known ones at first, but I’ll also add in a few newer sites to test how they compare to each other.

It’s been a while since I’ve used classified ads, so it will be interesting to start this up again and test some methods using the free listing services.

CPA offers will also play into my plans. I’ve been researching for the last few days to try and get an idea if what sort of CPA program I will go with, so I do have a few in mind already.

I have some blogs set up that I’ve not really paid much attention too recently, so this challenge will give me an excellent chance to really invest my time in those sites, and hopefully get them off the ground again.

The last challenge I attempted was a big learning curve, and I’m hoping that this one will be the same. Trial(Try-All) and error are sometimes the best way to learn, and pretty much the way I have always learned in the past:)

Anyway, I must go now a get started right away! $200 per week here I come!!

]]> http://www.flopidle.com/764/try-all-and-error-200-a-week-by-january-2010/feed/ 0 http://www.flopidle.com/751/whiteboard-wonder-planning-your-way-to-success/ http://www.flopidle.com/751/whiteboard-wonder-planning-your-way-to-success/#comments Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:50:28 +0000 admin http://www.flopidle.com/?p=751

Recently I decided enough was enough, and that I needed a game plan and a target to work toward. Gone are the days of wishing for Ferrari’s and Yachts! I needed a concrete and obtainable monetary figure to work toward.

I thought that if I had short term goals I would then be able to work my way toward bigger goals in more manageable chunks. Almost like climbing up a set of stairs by starting with the very first step. Or if your really crazy you might even go for the second step instead;)

For this planning stage I even bought some brand new shiny dry erase markers. EXPO Dry Erase Marker Organizer, Chisel Tip, Assorted, Six per Kit (83056)
<- If you need dry erase markers these work great, last ages, and will get your site to number 1 in Google overnight! Ok that’s a lie, but if you do buy them through that link I will be another step closer to my target;)

Where was I……… Oh right.  So This is what I did. For those also in “day jobs” like me we shall call this the great escape;)

Line Up Your Target

I decided my most important first target would be to work toward taking over my job income, with what I earn online. I then went to break down what I would need to earn online by – per month – per week – per day – per hour and even per 30mins!

But rather than take my monthly income from my job exactly as it is, to make it even more obtainable I wrote down every single bill/tax that we need to pay, added food/gas expenses as well as some spending money for dry erase refills! And then rounded it up a bit for the unknown expenses. In the end I had a figure to work with that would still pay all the bills, and was also slightly under my job income per month.

Here is how that whiteboard looked after I got through the planning stage.

As you can see from this picture, for a “Full Takeover” of income I would need to earn $3.29 per hour, every hour of every day to achieve it.

Now I had something tangible to work with, but I didn’t just stop at that. Under the full takeover you will see “24 hr week” which is referring to what I would have to earn that would enable me to cut my work week hours down to just 24.

The reason for all of this is to make it possible for me to dedicate more and more time to internet/affiliate marketing. With the biggest first step target to obtain a full-time income from my methods, that then in turn would allow me to spend all my time online!

$3.29 per hour is going to seem ridiculous to some, but when you are pretty new it’s actually a big target;)

My biggest problem is consistency, some days I make this target look like its going to be easy, but then you go days with less numbers in your affiliate accounts than the alphabet;)

The good news is that I’ve never had a target to aim toward until now, so not only do I have a target to aim for, I also know that its pretty obtainable which keeps my motivation sky high! Since completing this whiteboard plan I’ve definitely been able to focus so much more on what I need to be doing, and not wasting time.

The last thing I did was leave myself a reminder every time I sit down at the computer….

Before I leave you, if you need a whiteboard to try this one;) -> White Melamine Dry Erase Boards with Aluminum Frame, 36 x 24 (UNV43623) Category: Dry Erase Boards

This is a killer 36×24 whiteboard with an aluminum frame, and not only that but it will also double your list practically over night. It’s a MUST HAVE!;)

When I first launched The Self Publishing System right off the bat I hit PPC(Pay Per Click) search networks, which I not only singled out Google Adwords with, oh no that would be discrimination after all. Do not forget about Yahoo and now Bing, both have great PPC platforms to use in your new promotion campaigns.

For obvious reasons using the PPC search network to try and match my product with somebody’s related search term is the first thing I always try. And occasionally I’ll also add a Content PPC Campaign into the mix too.

If you’re not too sure about what I mean by PPC Search Network and PPC Content Network, let me explain this first…

PPC Search And PPC Content Networks

SEARCH NETWORK:

The best way to explain this is to use a character named……. Tom. Tom is at home right now in front of his computer with an idea that he wants to find a book about self publishing. So he opens up Google at types in…

He then clicks on that “Search” button and gets these results …

Now I know this is not the best image quality you have ever seen im sure, all this is for is to have you look at the two circled red boxes above. The two red boxes represent the search PPC network, they are paid listings that display along side the regular un-paid listings when someone enters a keyword search into Google, and in this case that keyword search was “Self Publishing Book”.

If you use the PPC Search Network its your job to match peoples keyword phrases with your ads products topic. So in the case of Tom’s search, all the PPC ads in the red boxes are related products to his search term, and its that ads job to try and entice Tom to click on it rather than the regular Google listings, if he does, the owner of that ad is charged a cost per click(CPC).

CONTENT NETWORK:

Here we use Tom again, only this time we join him after he has already clicked on one of the listings in the previous search, and as the paid ads did not appeal to him he ended up clicking on one of the natural listings, #4 to be exact…

Again see that red box? Welcome to the PPC Content Network!!

These ads are displayed along side content within a website -> “Content Network”. So now Tom is reading an article about self publishing on ehow.com, he can still be presented with PPC ads, only this time they are content based.

Now if Tom decides to click on one of the ads in the red circle the owners still gets charged for the CPC, but not as much as the search network. Why?….

Because the PPC Search Network is more targeted and more likely to get you sales than the content network(in most cases).

For example in Tom’s first search he was looking for a book about self publishing in a buying state of mind, so the results he was presented with were all possible targets for him to spend money.

In the second search Tom was already at a site reading about self publishing, and may have already found what he was looking for. So the chances of him clicking on your content based PPC ads are greatly reduced.

So why even bother with the PPC Content Network?..

The Great Thing About The Content Network

Think of it like this….

The PPC Search Network is usually a lone searcher looking for information. Meaning 1.

So even though we are fond of Tom, we sometimes might want to reach a bigger audience with one ad using the content network…

The PPC Content Network is usually a hoard of people with related interests in the website they are on.

And remember the Content Network CPC is usually much lower than the Search Network, sometimes its considerable!

Just remember that in the content network people are usually not really looking for information as such, they are more on that site because they go there all the time, or it could even be a forum where they discuss everything about that sites topic. So when using the content network expect your Click Through Rate (which is the # of times your ad is displayed and clicked on) to be awful!

Don’t panic about numbers just yet, here is how to use the PPC Content Network to get Affiliates..

Content Ads And Affiliates

I’m not going to take you through all the stages of how to set up an account and get a PPC Content Campaign up and running, if you do need these steps you can visit this Google Adwords page and learn all about it.

What I am going to do is show you the steps im using right now to find affiliates using the Content Network. My main idea behind all of this is that I don’t think in most cases affiliates go into Google as Tom did, and enter a search term like “Affiliate products to promote”. Some do, but the majority of them in my eyes are already hanging out together at sites all over the web.

Affiliates are everywhere, but it can be a pain to try and get their attention in order for them to promote your stuff! Meaning that you would probably have to sign up and register with forums all over the place to try and get at least one post in front of them, only to have it drop out the forums latest discussions in a matter of minutes, that’s even if the forums will let you post offers at all?

This is where this content network method works so well. My method is to find related and popular affiliate forums and websites, set up a PPC content campaign, enter in all the URL’s to those sites, write a couple of ads, and then launch that campaign with 2 ads to all those sites at the same time.

STEP ONE:

Head over to Google and search for “affiliate forums” hit Search.

Open Notepad or any text editor and have it ready.

Now as im doing above copy and paste all the URL’s you can(the more the better) into your blank text editor file, then save it. Remember that you can repeat this process with other related search terms like…

“affiliate programs”

“affiliate marketing”

“affiliate opportunities”

“how to make money at home”

And so on.

STEP TWO:

Start a new PPC Content Campaign as you would any other, but when you get to add managed placements you want to select the manual option which allows you to paste in the URL’s you choose, and not Google’s choice.

Now paste in all the URL’s from your text editor into the “placements” box in your content campaign.

When you write your ad try and make it stand out as much as you can, conversational styles work better although I might have gone too far with these ads ..

I have an affiliate page for The Self Publishing System set up here ->Affiliate Center , and this is what I use for the ads destination URL. So if a potential affiliate clicks on the ad they will be taken to the affiliate center where they can pick up banners and other promotional tools to help them sell it.

For a daily cost I will usually use about 15-25 dollars, and a cost per click will start off at around 25c. These numbers can be adjusted once you start to get stats back from your ads when they go live. But I very rarely hit the daily budget maximum because the CPC is allot lower than the search network, so even though you enter 25c a click you will probably see about 10-15c on average.

Check over all your options and once your are happy launch your PPC Content Campaign.

STEP THREE:

After a while depending on what PPC Content Network you use(Google/Yahoo/Bing) you will start to see some results returned. Check over the stats to see what site ads are working the best, and also check your impressions to see if they are all displaying your ads? If not you may need to increase your CPC a little, but not by much.

Its also a good idea to split test different types of ads over your campaign, try new headlines, offers, anything you feel will be relevant to what affiliates are looking for in an offer. Test and Track;)

Why Does This Work?

The reason I think this works so well is because you are targeting a group of people on a site with your related offer, which means that the affiliates are able to see your offer from the site they are already on rather than have to search by themselves for one.

Also having an affiliate center set up with banners and promotional tools makes it so much easier for them to get started. They just click your ad to be taken to a page full of tools they can use to promote your product instantly, they hardly have to do a thing.

And last of all, if they start to promote your products and make sales they may go back to those forums and let others know too, which in turn could net you a few more affiliate via word of mouth.

Content Is King

Remember what I said in the beginning? You don’t have to just use Google, give Yahoo and Bing a try to see how their content networks differ from Google, you might be surprised?

You can still use the content network to try and sell a product yourself, if not only for the cheap CPC charges alone, but also because you know your offer is floating in front of possible buyers, if you pick your sites well this can be a goldmine of potential too.

This has been a long post, but I hope I got this method across without any problems. If you do have any questions let me know and i’ll be glad to answer them for you.

Good Luck!

Realizing that I was not going to make my goal made me rethink what I was doing. When I started this all off I created niche site after niche site spreading my focus over such a large area that it was hard to concentrate on what I needed to be doing.

And in between that I was also creating my own products too, it was mayhem. So what I did was create a masterfile in excel that listed all my current niche sites, within those lists I created a few columns that included information like…

• Domain Name
• Expires
• In Use
• Type
• Sales
• Conversion Rate
• Analytics Data

Domain Name: This one is self explanatory.;)

Expires: When does this domain expire? Meaning that if this niche site sucks but yet it has 3 years left to expire, I might consider a new site design/approach or even to try and sell it. But if the domain has a few weeks left, then maybe I’d consider letting it expire.

In Use: Am I currently using this domain as a site? I have this amazing ability to just buy domain names with the idea to start a new site, but never do. Is it only me that does this?

Type: This column is for if I do use this site what type is it? This could be a blog, e-commerce site, or even a sales page if its selling one of my own products.

Sales: Has this site made any sales at all? This could represent some potential in this niche.

Con/Rate: If it has made sales how is it converting? Do I need to get it mass traffic before I even earn a dollar.

Analytics Data: First of all is analytics installed? If not then I need to add it to get any idea of what the site is doing. And second, by looking at the analytics data I would decide what I’d be dealing with if I did go ahead with this site.

Other Info In The Master File

Other information I included in this masterfile were the usernames and passwords. When you have a few sites online you do tend to forget login details sometimes, especially when you don’t use them that much.

Once I had all this info in place I then color filled in the site lines that had made sales already, I would use this as a quick reference to see what ones had potential right away. The domains that were not in use I colored in a darker color, this would represent that they are not even online yet, so either I did something with them, or I looked at the keywords and competition data again to make sure they are worth pursuing.

Now I had all this data in the masterfile it really made me see things I’ve overlooked, it gave me a birds eye view of the performance of my sites, which with just one glance I saw where best to focus my energy. This will now save me a ton of effort on a lost cause, or make me rethink a new plan for the domains/sites that are not performing.

The best thing about this masterfile is that it made me concentrate on a site I didn’t even bother with for weeks, but yet it still made a sale, so I put in more effort over the past few days and yesterday it made another sale! Without me taking this step back that sale may have never happened.

If only I started this the same time I started Operation Imac, who knows I may have been typing this on one;) I do recommend a masterfile to anyone with a few sites, you don’t have to have excel either, even notepad will do the trick. You could also try the FREE Google Spreadsheet.

Whatever you use give one a try, it does not take long and could give you an idea of where to best focus your energy too. Good Luck.

The affiliate program is currently set-up with Clickbank.com, and The Self Publishing System has just been entered into the marketplace listed at $67, so every affiliate lead that converts into a sale will earn each affiliate a 50% commission.

The best thing about promoting The Self Publishing System as an affiliate is its scope, not only does it appeal to authors, but you could promote it to anyone that writes their own material and wants to take it to a new level like bloggers, poets, in fact anyone that has an interest in info product creation.

Affiliate Lead Tools

I tried to make it as easy as possible to help you get that affiliate lead that converts into a sale. I put together an affiliate center with a bunch of tools that you can use right away without doing any work yourself.

In the affiliate center you will find banners, promo videos, and pre-written tweets and Facebook updates as well an email broadcast to send out to your lists, simple copy and paste.

If you are a new affiliate the affiliate center also has details on how to sign up and start promoting The Self Publishing System via Clickbank, everything you need is all on the page to get you started right away and hopefully making those sales.

Affiliate Feedback

As an affiliate if you would also like to see something included in the affiliate center that would help you convert that affiliate lead into a sale , then please let me know and I’ll work on adding that right away.

Also if there is any other feedback or questions you may have about this program it would be great to hear from you too. I ‘ll try my best to accommodate your needs to the best of my ability.

Please check out the link below to find out more about this program, and also to grab the FREE promotional tools on that page. GOOD LUCK!;)

Take A Look At The Affiliate Center