There are good reasons to cloak affiliate links. For one, they are too difficult for people to remember or type in to a search engine to find your site. For another, hackers can use them to steal your commissions … or potential customers will just use the vendor’s URL minus your affiliate addition.
One can cloak links in a variety of ways.
1) Of course, one can use various link shorteners. The shortened link will not be in a neat and memorable form of your choosing, but it will be cloaked. Among shorteners are bit.ly (which can be set up for tracking clicks), tinyurl.com, budurl.com, snipurl.com, cli.gs, fb.me, and goo.gl most recently.
2) Create a file in your cpanel named something you like (presumably something to do with the product or service) and put the affiliate link in the html code of the file.
3) Set up a unique domain name and forward it to your affiliate link.
4) PHP Header Redirects.
Use the code: <?php header( ‘Location: http://www.yourtargetdomain.com/new_page.html’ ) ;?>
5) Use Acloaker.com according to the following video, which assumes the use of ftp software wuch as FileZilla.
Tags: link cloaking
A former Muslim college roommate once gently expressed his offense at the notion of God becoming flesh. He objected to the Jesus-born-in-Bethlehem story as relayed in Christian circles.
I saw his point. How could a great, just, wholly-other sort of a Being humiliate Himself, condescending to becoming a burping, unclean-stuff producing baby human? Sort of like a President or monarch morphing into a stray dog or a flea … only far more so.
So here we are in the middle of seasonal stress. Yet still there are things out there that incite our hearts to wonder and awe. A single cell. An evening sky. Galaxies. A colorful and fertile scene shaped by water, valley, and mountain. Mocking such things may be more than in bad taste. How much more so if at an ineffable, holy, unimaginably great God.
Of course, we sometimes chide ourselves for being too caught up in material things (like gifts and presents). There has to be something more important out there than being a Scrooge. Some greater “why” than making a buck and buying your three year old more socks.
Not that socks and money are bad things in themselves. Sometimes errands and work projects are driven by relatively important “why’s.”
Question then arises whether there can be a relationship between the mundane and the wonderful, between retail stores and ultimate purpose, between the material and the spiritual, even between humans and God. Not that there always is, but is it possible?
The story of Jesus’ birth suggests there may be. For one thing, it comes in a context in which God made the material, including our bodies. As God’s creations, we are here for God’s purposes.
For another, The Birth suggests that God did graciously condescend to relate to us mere humans. The Christmas story is that God became a man for a brief period of years and showed humanity something about meaning, ultimate purpose, and that which is most awe-inspiring. He emptied Himself for us.
And that leaves open the possibility of a greater “Why” to our seasonal busy-ness and daily business.
Tags: Christmas
Aside from lists of basic online affiliate and internet marketing resources and resources on ebook creation and outsourcing, I thought the following miscellaneous sites list, while naturally incomplete, may nonetheless be useful, partly for its brevity.
Sites for checking traffic
An index of top internet marketing gurus
Legal form generator
Outsource CD and DVD duplication
Record interviews
Video Storage, unlimited playback
Membership site manager
Buying and selling websites
Create tests to figure out what people are doing on your website.
Opt-in at foot of page
Professional looking talking cartoon heads service
Determine plagiarism of or duplicate content
Find code errors
Test viewing load capacity of your blog or site
Any additional suggestions?
Tags: online marketing, resources list
In this 23 November 2009 video, Elliott Wave adherent Robert Prechter takes the minority position that the “2008-type” recession is not over and that the US dollar’s near-term future looks bullish.
For more on the economic theory, see economic trends.
Tags: Elliott Wave, Prechter
Seth Godin has argued that the new ride-the-wave economic future is in ideas. Once it was small farms … then factories, and now in the information and internet age, what’s hot is ideas. Or ideas that people can use, will buy, and want. Ideas like those tied to social media, computer games, conservative financing, identity theft protection, online catalogs, networking, self-help, do it yourself, search engines, whatever solves the next problem.
In this economic environment, the importance of creativity is that the person who can come up with and monetize the best ideas wins.
Steve Little argues that there are a number of attributes associated with success in business, the foremost of which is creativity. Little cites Robert Epstein, who argues that there are four core competencies to creativity: “Capturing, Surrounding, Challenging, and Broadening.”
Capturing ideas is not a new idea. Here, you pull out the index cards from your back pocket or purse and write down an idea right after it passes through your mind. Or you use a palm pilot, computer, voice recorder, etc. When you wake at night, when you witness a scene on the highway, when you daydream, when you are trying to articulate an experience … whenever you come up with an idea, put in writing, record it, capture it.
Surrounding yourself with creative people and resources helps too. This is similar to broadening, which has to do with reading and researching new things in a broad range of topics. As the phrase goes, garbage in, garbage out. On the flip side, the broader and more in-depth our exposure to ideas, the more we have to work with in forming our own interconnected ideas. Of course, personal contact with creative people can be stimulating and competitive.
Further, creativity neuroscience suggests that challenging ourselves with tough problems helps develop our creative capacity. This can be in the form of real-life business challenges or in the form of puzzles and games.
There are, of course, other ways to stimulate creativity. REM sleep is thought to be important. Interestingly, Little cites a practice of Salvador Dali and Thomas Edison. Dali and Edison would briefly consider a problem, then relax in a chair or bed while holding an object in the hand. As the person began to drift off into sleep, the object would slip out of the hand, and awaken the person with a clatter. At that waking moment (”known as the hypnagogic state”), a creative thought would sometimes occur, which Dali and Edison would immediately record and then act upon.
A word of caution. There is some debate whether certain positive or negative emotions are more conducive to creative thought. Brilliant ideas can come from the depressed, for example. However, fear of failure, Little reminds us, strongly decreases creativity.
For more help on increasing creativity and success in business, visit The Perfect Business Builder (with which I am affiliated).
Tags: creativity, ideas
Optimizing your website to both rank well in search engines and attract targeted human traffic particularly involves good and relevant content, helpful internal linking for navigation purposes, and inbound links. Meta tags in the source code may also help, although they are not weighted as heavily as they once were. They come between the head tags — <head>in between these</head>.
Title Tags
Titles in title tags come between the beginning and the closing tags (between <title> and </title>). They should be about 63 characters or less so they can be read on search engines. Include keywords related to page. Have title tag for each page, and make each viewer friendly.
Title tags will appear in the upper left of the browser screen when the page is in view. Title tags are probably the most important of the tags listed here, and thought should be given not only to how the title summarizes the page it represents, but give the reader reason to read the page. A too-generic title tag is not in your best interest.
Description Tags
Description tags briefly summarize a given page. The format looks like this: <meta name=”description” content=”description in here”>, with the description between the quotation marks as here. Description tags should be less than 160 characters in length (1 to 3 sentences). If your site is indexed, the description may be important for conversions, but probably not for SEO (search engine optimization). The description should be viewer friendly, with a keyword included near beginning.
The content of a description tag may show up as the second (and possibly third) line in organic search results.
Keyword Tags
Keyword tag tag format looks like this: <meta name=”keywords” content=”keywords in here”> with the keywords between the quotation marks as here. One or perhaps two keywords are recommended per page. Keyword tags are not overly important; but don’t overdo the keywords by multiplying or spamming them. Use keywords found in the page represented. However, Google does not use keywords in the keyword tag for ranking.
Heading Tags
<h1>This is heading 1</h1>
<h2>This is heading 2</h2>
<h3>This is heading 3</h3>
Heading tags (not to be confused with <head> tags above) may make it easier for a robot to crawl your site, sort of like a bold-print outline to a human.
And of course the headers, keywords, descriptions, and titles should be representative of and relevant to the pages they represent.
Lastly, Brad Fallon notes, “SEO is a marathon, not a [quick] race.” It will probably take time for your site to be ranked in the search engines.
P.S. For further information on html basics, see my HTML Basics post or for training in internet marketing, see Niche Profit Classroom for which I am an affiliate.
When you do an internet search, do you want to see results comprised of a list that shows identical content for every entry, though on a variety of sites and sources? Or would you prefer a diverse mix of relevant entries with each containing different content? Google, for one, bets you prefer the latter.
Pretty obvious, no? You’d probably look at at list of all the same stuff in disgust and call it “spam.”
If you are a webmaster, duplicate content on your site or blog is sometimes preferable; duplicate content is not spam. Despite a common notion, Google does not penalize for duplicate content. It just seeks to avoid showing duplicate content in any given search results.
So if you have one article submitted to a long list of article directories, eventually Google is going to show only one of them for any given search query. However, if many webmasters publish your one article on their sites, users may find your content in ways other than by typing a keyword into a search engine. Particularly when those sites are popular.
Don’t be afraid of duplicate content. But if you want your content to be seen, write great content using keywords people want to find (preferably with lower competition among webmasters). Probably on the whole, that will work better than when you post your same content in a lot of places.
Tags: duplicate content
On November 16, 2009–and after years of preparation–ICANN will launch its fast track process for international domain names, so that web users whose native tongue is not English or who do not use characters from Romance (Latin-based) languages can use domain names using their own Korean, Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Hindi, or other characters.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers or ICANN has served to establish policies regarding domain names on the internet.
Tags: ICANN, international domain names
Each of us is a unique bundle of personality, physical body, and experience. Ideals of success to each of us is thus unique to the individual, however much we may share likenesses with others. Ideals of success are the end result without regard for the process. They form a kind of guiding light for our minds and affect our intentions and behavior along the way.
Or at least that is what ideals of success can do. Along the way, many of us lose sight of them.
We are beaten down by failure. Distracted by the “tyranny of the urgent.” Fearful of pain or loss. Entangled in commitment. Sabotaged by our own disbelief.
Or so says Steve Little, who has made a career of helping people achieve their definition of success, partly by unshackling the mind from hindrances.
I for one would grant that there are forces beyond our control. We cannot make other people’s decisions for them. We cannot change the past, in particular past actions by which we became guilty or embarrassed. We cannot change our fundamental nature or the law of gravity.
But at the same time, we can fear our own success lest, having achieved it, we lose it again or it proves unsatisfying. Does that sound strange? In how many ways have we learned to place conditions, obstacles, and warnings as barriers to our success? When we gain success in some way, do we even recognize it or stop to be grateful we have arrived in some measure? And so we defeat ourselves in advance of battle.
If we cannot control everything, we can control how we think:
about setbacks
about obstacles
about things that make us feel afraid
about things that make us feel joyful.
But this introduces another layer in my view. Success or the ideals of success must be seen in relation to Providence and moral principle. Providence may steer and enable me on the path to success as a blessing, or thwart my efforts.
My own ideals of success themselves are best defined by Providence rather than me. Indeed, they are subject to Providence. And the achievement of success can be either a blessing or a curse depending on my obedience to moral principle.
How Providence and human action play out is more than I can say, though at best I can believe in both the good intentions of Providence toward me and in the vital role my thoughts and intentions play in the success I receive. And so …
The first step toward success is for the mind to arrive at it.
… All of which I propose in part because I am interested in your thoughts on the topic and your stories. Your comments are invited. What is success to you?
Peter Rubel
P.S. If the big-picture market is driven by mass psychology and mass mood, so the success of the individuals making up the mass are each driven by their own–our own–feelings and thoughts. In this connection, Henry Ford famously commented, “Whether you think you can, or can’t, you’re right.”
P.P.S. Steve Little (with whom I am affiliated) helpfully divides success into six categories:
- Finance and Money
- Business or Employment
- Recreation and Fun
- Health and Fitness
- Relationships
- Community
Tags: success
Many small business owners, especially if working from home, are besieged with distractions and a plethora of opportunities … to consume their time. And often they work long hours, whether or not the things they do are likely to make them money.
Recently Adam Short and Alen Sultanic of Niche Profit Classroom (of which I am an affiliate) held a webinar regarding boosting productivity and regaining a balanced life, especially for internet marketers.
For one thing, they suggest focusing on tasks that make money. That usually means things like building traffic, writing follow up email sequences and sales copy, and improving product quality.
1) Before that, however, comes the first self-management principle: writing “to-do” lists. Brainstorm on paper, on a large white board, and/or online at a place like Base Camp.
2) One can then arrange the lists by priority, with money making potential driving items to the top.
3) Settling goals and deadlines for the items on the list logically comes third. Short and Sultanic recommend goal setting down to the hour of each and every work day … and setting goals for one month, three months, six months, and one year out. Base Camp helps with that too. Cross out the completed tasks.
4) Of course, goals without commitment isn’t going to get one very far. Short and Sultanic stated or implied three means of boosting commitment to meeting deadlines:
- a. Remembering the pain of long hours and an unbalanced life. And conversely the pleasure of time off.
- b. Find and use a mutual accountability partner. That’s what Adam and Alen are to each other.
- c. Reviewing goals and deadlines once in the morning and once in the evening.
5) Quit work on time. That means brief breaks every 45 minutes (or whatever you decide). That means stopping at 5:00 PM (or whatever you decide) rather than at 1:00 AM. In fact, that also means going to bed by 11:00 PM. Otherwise you will miss the most efficient sleep time, and your productivity will suffer from lack of sleep.
You are more productive if you work when you work, relax when you relax, and do not over-work.
6) Follow rituals and rhythms that work for you. Morning hygiene, breakfast, prayer, answering emails, tidying up, business, breaks — whatever. Your mind becomes more efficient following patterns.
In principle, you’ve got only so much time to get things done, and you set your mind to get them done in the time frame that the schedule allows. Ritual and rhythm help focus the mind to the “to-do” list that has been scheduled.
7) Attend to your health. Regular exercise. Enough sleep (seven hours minimum). Proper diet. Your productivity suffers when you neglect these.
Plan each day, then execute the plan for increased productivity. Can you beat that?
Tags: management, productivity
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