Cloaked Links

I have been doing an experiment with blogging and pinging, one of the ways which supposedly gets your site listed and ranked higher quicker.

Firstly I’ll explain what blogging and pinging is. Blog and ping is a technique you can use to get your site listed in search engines. The idea is that search engines like blogs because of the ever updating content, so they keep going back. By writing a blog and placing some site links in the posts, the search engines will spider the links, and pages shortly after you blog.

Pinging is when you send a “ping” to let the directories, which keep lists of blogs, and when those blogs are updated, know that you have added content to your blog. These are allegedly closely watched by the search engine spiders, so they can spider any new content and add it to the search engine which controls them.

Anyway, back to my experiment, does blogging and pinging really get your site noticed?

Well my results have been encouraging. I have tested by only using a blog as the front page of a new information site I started. http://www.informationpagesonline.com has only been advertised by way of the blog to announce new content, and then pinged through http://www.pingoat.com which distributes the blog entries to several large ping sites.

Following a week of adding content, and then posting an announcement of the new content to the blog on the front page and pinging with pingoat, the site seems to be getting visitors to most of the sections, which I can see from the log files. I can also see some of the traffic is coming from search engines, and also a lot of spider activity can be seen on the site, where the search engines are crawling the content.

So I have to conclude that blogging and pinging  is a way of getting listed on search engines, or at least of getting noticed by them quickly.

Should you be blogging and pinging?

Of course that’s up to you, but for the time it takes, it maybe worth trying blog and ping for yourself and tracking the results. A quick blog post (use http://www.blogger.com if you don’t already have a blog) and then ping with pingoat takes only a few minutes, and may help a site into all the search engines quickly.

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So you made an amazing auto-responder email series, you wrote tons of brilliant articles, and you have an extremely catchy landing page that sucks in the leads. Yet somehow you’re getting almost no sells and you don’t understand why. Sound familiar? I know this is a pretty common problem, but it’s unfortunate that people still haven’t figured out what’s causing it.

I’ll try to explain a little of what’s happening to your sales throughout this article. Contrary to what you might be thinking – it is completely possible that your sales funnel is making tons of sales, but you’re not seeing any of the commission. Obviously this is a pretty big problem that you’ll want to take care of as soon as possible.

Basically what’s happening is this: the user is changing your affiliate ID to their own, or spyware on their computer is doing it. Both of these will stop you from getting credit for the sale even though you’re the one who made it. There’s no way that you can stop them from doing that, unless you cloak your link.

Link cloaking is when you program a redirect on your website that hides affiliate ID’s and makes it impossible for spyware or users to stop you from getting sales.

I hope you realize the difference this could make, you could be giving someone else all of your sales already. Instead of making money from your sales funnel you might be just handing it off to someone else.

Even if you make sales all the time without problems, some of them might still be stolen. It shouldn’t hurt anything to start cloaking your links so you lock in the sales. The problem is that it can be hard to make a good link cloak, unless you’re a programmer (or something of that nature).

Instead you can use one of the many link cloaking services on the internet, but I wouldn’t suggest you just use the first one that you find. Many of these will actually mess up the tracking cookies and you STILL won’t get credit for the sale. You need to make sure that you’re using a cloaking service designed for affiliate marketing – and there aren’t nearly as many of those.

I have heard horror stories of people who used redirection services such as TinyURL and Bit.ly – apparently they are notorious for often screwing up affiliate links and not giving you credit for any sales. Most other link shortening services will have these problems as well.

The best link cloaker is one that you can put on your own site so you don’t have to worry about anything breaking down or not working properly. As I mentioned earlier though, this can be difficult to make if you aren’t a programmer – or willing to pay for one.

I recommend you go here and get this free report about link cloaking and the best services for affiliate marketers: I don’t know of any better place to learn what works, and what doesn’t.

Discover more about link cloaking in the free Cloak and Dagger Affiliate Secrets report. Feel free to distribute this article in any form as long as you include this resource box. You can also include your affiliate link if you sign up at Clickbank Pirate.

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/affiliate-programs-articles/link-cloaking-and-affiliate-marketing–1566195.html

Affiliate programs are one of the web’s most effective marketing techniques. They create a win-win situation by which site A refers a visitor to site B, and site B pays site A a commission if the visitor makes a purchase.
Affiliate programs are one of the web’s most effective marketing techniques. They create a win-win situation by which site A refers a visitor to site B, and site B pays site A a commission if the visitor makes a purchase. The referrer site (affiliate), can make money with no overhead (no product, no warehouse, no collection risk). On the other hand, the destination site (vendor) receives a steady stream of qualified leads from hundreds, maybe thousands of affiliate sites, and doesn’t have to spend a dime unless a visitor makes a purchase.

The way it works is like this: the vendor gives the affiliate specific HTML code that it must use on its site to create a link to the vendor’s site. This code contains an embedded ID number that allows the vendor to know when an incoming visitor comes to them by clicking the link on the affiliate site.

The vendor’s servers will then set a cookie (a time sensitive electronic identification mechanism) in the visitor’s computer so that every time he comes back to the vendor’s site, the vendor’s servers will ‘remember’ that he was originally referred to them by the affiliate, and will pay him a commission when the visitor makes a purchase.

This makes it possible for the affiliate to make a commission even if the visitor doesn’t purchase anything the first time, but comes back and buys later. Also, it is not necessary that the visitor enter the vendor’s site through the affiliate’s link other than the first time, since the vendor’s servers will identify the cookie and will know that the visitor was originally referred to them by the affiliate.

At the vendor’s discretion, the cookies can be set up to expire that same day, remain active indefinitely, or anything in between (vendors usually call the duration of a cookie the “referral period”). For this reason, it is better to choose vendor partners that offer long referral periods (120 days is considered very good). This increases the affiliate’s chances of success, since very few people will buy on their first visit, although exceptions do occur with vendors that enjoy superb brand recognition and feature user friendly interfaces, like Amazon.com (the pioneer of affiliate programs) who, in spite of keeping cookies alive for only 24 hours, is able to generate a significant portion of its sales in the first few minutes after a visitor has clicked into their site.

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Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/affiliate-programs-articles/how-do-affiliate-programs-work-1561279.html