We all know how popular the social marketing site Twitter has become in the past 12-18 months. Have you joined the throngs to build your followers? Did you know that there are several marketers that are using it to it’s fullest advantage and becoming very successful with it?
Yes, there are ebooks sprouting up all over the place with instructionals on HOW to use it to it’s fullest advantage, but how many of the authors of those books have actually done it?
How about if I told you there is a brand new ebook out today that profiles 17 marketers who have used it and are extremely successful with it? Wouldn’t you consider picking it up to find out their Twitter ’secrets’ and how they have used it to become successful?
My friend and accountability partner, Peggy Baron, has done something unusual. She has queried 17 different marketers about their Twittering and has gotten some juicy tips and tricks from the likes of Willie Crawford, Craig Ballentyne, Bev Clement, and Connie Ragen Green to name a few.
Peggy was kind enough to provide me with a preview copy of the book and I must say that as I read through it, I was shocked at the simple, yet effective, methods that these marketers use to increase the number of followers they have and how they use Twitter to add to their numerous income streams.
Here are a couple of the ways Twitter has been used:
One marketer has used Twitter to get past the ‘gatekeepers’ of some of a few ‘gooroos’ only to be asked to help out on a couple of projects. Find out who that was here.
Another one has used Twitter to put out the word that they were in a bind when a phone interview subject no-showed. The followers who responded ended up turning the conference call into a brainstorming session. Which Twitterer was that?
Find out who has used Twitter as a source for one of their successful products.
These marketers will tell you about their personal Twitter successes and what they’ve learned in using Twitter to grow their businesses. They will also give you TIPS to get you on the right track.
So if you’re interested in growing your business and using Twitter as another marketing tool, pick up a copy of Twitter Success Stories. I’m guessing you will come away with some great ideas you can apply to your business.
Until next time,
Here’s to YOUR Successes,
Ron
P.S. I pulled out a quote from the book for you that I liked:
“If you own a business of any size and you’re still not Twittering, you’re missing out on what amounts to a global virtual chamber of commerce networking event you can access anytime, day or night.” from Heidi Richards Mooney
Cloaking your affiliate links is a good way to keep people from stealing your commissions. All a “cloak” has to be is some sort of a redirect.
One of the ways that I was ‘taught’ how to create a redirect a while back was to use a .php file and upload to your server. That way when your customers clicked on the URL, their browser would redirect to the sales page that you are promoting.
Don’t get me wrong, I still use this method for a number of the affiliate products that I promote and they still do work. The problem that I found was that for each new affiliate product that I was promoting, whether it be here, or in the emails I send to my subscribers, I had to upload a brand new ‘file’ to my webhost.
That is until I discovered a much easier way to do this. It’s a very easy way to manage as many redirects as you want, and it’s FREE and easy to manage with just a single file.
Let me give you an example. My good freind, and one of my mentors, Doug Champigny, has just released a new PLR package in a smoking hot niche. You can pick up his Aromatherapy PLR Package and have the rights to do just about anything with it. You will need to read the license agreement to find out what you can’t do, but that’s pretty standard with a package like this. The Aromatherapy PLR Package includes a 50 page eBook in .doc & .pdf formats, 10 Aromatherapy Articles, mp3 audio versions of all 10 articles, TWO sets of website graphics, PLUS the .jpg AND .psd graphics for everything! After all of that, you won’t believe the price. I told Doug that he needed to go see his therapist with the price that he is offering this package at.
You will notice that when you ‘hover’ over the link, it looks like you are going to go to a page on my site (http://www.ron-barrett.com/AromaTherapyPLR.html), but you aren’t.
You will be ‘redirected’ to Doug’s site. This is something that ALL affiliate marketers should be doing, but a majority don’t. Why? I am not sure. Maybe it’s because they think it’s a bit too complex to create the file and upload it to their site.
Well, I am here today to show you how easy this really is. The person I learned this from claims that it is so easy, even a five year old could do it. It is now my preferred method of creating redirects.
There are a couple of problems with linking directly to an affiliate page with your ID. The obvious reason is that someone could steal your commissions if they are also a member of the same affiliate program (which is common if it is a large program like Clickbank).
The other main reason is that a lot of people are wary of clicking on long affiliate links, things with lots of letters and numbers. This seems to be more and more the case as I sometimes see these mile-long links, with un-needed crap in them like “id=xxxx”, “www.yourwebsite.com/cgi-bin/affil-id=xxxx” etc. A good affiliate link should have two items MAXIMUM. If the program is specifically towards one URL it should only have one piece of information, your affiliate name (preferably a name instead of a number). But that’s not always within your control.
The most common thing I see a lot of affiliates doing is just creating the folder or the file and doing a simple redirect. So if that person needed the URL: http://www.yourwebsite.com/theaffiliateprogram
… To send the user to:
http://www.affiliateprogram.com/?affiliate-id
They’d physically make the folder on their site and add in an index.php redirect. Sometimes they’ll also use .html redirect, which uses meta tags… which means the .html file has to actually load before the redirect takes place. That makes the trip take even LONGER and in the meantime the visitor is staring at a blank page.
This would be ok, but what if you were promoting 20 or 30 or 40 affiliate programs? That’s a lot of folders to get the coding exactly right and to upload each and every time you add another program.
Anyway, now that I have given you reason to change the method you use to redirect with, my NEW preferred method is with an .htaccess file. All I have to do when I want to add or remove a redirect is just edit a text file, and upload it to the webserver.
(In this example, you would change the “xxxxx” above to your own Clickbank name.)
You put each redirect on a different line. What you first need is the word “Redirect”, and then the relative path the .htaccss file is going to intercept. In the first line since my second part of it is “/clickbank”, that means if my domain is:
http://www.mydomain.com
… And someone goes to:
http://www.mydomain.com/clickbank
… It will send the user to that third item on that line, the long Clickbank hoplink.
The redirect doesn’t just have to be a folder name. You could even make people think you’re linking straight to an HTML file, like in the second example. Or, it could even end with “.php” if you want (3rd line) or even something you make up, like “dot-crap” (last example).
So go ahead and add tons of affiliate redirects in seconds. Just modify that above code to your needs, save it as “htaccess.txt”, upload, change file permissions to 755, and rename to “.htaccess” with that dot in front.
The file will disappear to you, because it becomes hidden, but if you need to come back to that list later you can still see it with many FTP programs. I use FileZilla and I go to Server -> Force Showing Hidden Files. I don’t know how it’ll be in your FTP client… in a lot of them this sort of choice doesn’t even exist. But that will allow you to see the .htaccess file for future editing if you lose the copy on your hard drive. (Hey, stuff happens.)
One last thing you should notice is that even though .htaccess has sort of a “bare bones” feel to it, it doesn’t have to be hard to read. Look at what I’ve done, I’ve spaced everything up so when I look at the file in Notepad with my fixed-width font everything lines up nicely.
If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment and I will get back with you as soon as I can. YES, I do monitor comments.
Well, it looks like the hyped launch of Butterfly Marketing 2 is almost over with. Did you get your copy? From what I have heard, Mike is leaving the site up with the promotional price until sometime today…NO, I won’t have an affiliate link for it!
What I do have today is something that I stumbled across the other day and I think it’s pretty cool.
Take a look at the address bar in your browser. See that image to the left of the url? That’s a ‘mini’ version of the picture in the header banner and when you bookmark this site, that picture will be to the left of the text in the bookmark.
Go ahead, try it now. After you add my site to your favorites, when you go back to the list, you should see the mini image of me next to the text of the site.
Pretty cool huh?
If it doesn’t show up in Internet Explorer, try it in FireFox, I know it works there.
I know your next question is ‘how do I do that?’
Well, really it’s fairly easy if you aren’t afraid of digging in to the coding on you site.
First of all, you will need get the ‘favicon’ image that you will upload to your webhost. As I said earlier, I found this site while cruising around looking for a couple of other things:
What you will do is click the browse button and find the image you want to turn in to your favicon icon and then follow the rest of the instructions.
Once you have downloaded it, you will need to upload the image to your host using your favorite ftp client (I use FileZilla). Upload it to the root of your website.
Now, depending on whether you have a ‘regular’ website (in other words, you have designed, or someone else has, the html coding) or a wordpress site, is how you will proceed next.
If you have a regular site, all you need to do is open the ‘index.html’ file in your editor and in between the <head> and </head> section of the coding, you will insert this code:
You may or may not have to put the entire URL there, but just for ’safety sake’ I include it.
If you are using a wordpress theme for your site, you will need to do something a bit different. Depending on what version of wordpress you are using (I am on version 2.7.1) will be how you will make the changes.
First of all, go into your admin panel and select Appearance and then Editor. On the right hand side, select ‘header.php’ and you will be brought to the editor window.
You will want to find the code that looks similar to this:
Once you have found it, then you can proceed to edit the code to get the favicon to appear in the address bar. Just like this:
Once you have that done, click on ‘update file’ at the bottom of the window and open another browser window and check the site. If you have done everything correctly, you should see the favicon in the address bar.
Congratulations! You have just edited code!
Next post I am going to have some information on a ‘new’ way to do redirects. You absolutely must be doing it this way if you are doing ANY affiliate marketing at all!
Til then, don’t forget to sign up for my Internet Marketing Insights newsletter for more ‘inside’ information on Internet Marketing along with the ‘Relationship Marketing’ series.
