I recently watched a video about Affiliate Marketing by Russell Brunson that really touched a nerve. It was a short presentation but the presentations style was highly effective. In this video, Russell Brunson stated “That 97% of affiliate marketers make less than $157 per month”.

That’s shocking!

Now there are many reasons why Affiliate Marketers are NOT earning significant commissions.

One reason is that they are NOT properly cloaking and tracking their affiliate links and this makes them very vulnerable as the following story illustrates…

I was promoting a product by a well-known Internet Marketer. It was an excellent product. It had a great sales page. The price point was right. It had great bonuses. Naturally, I bought the product myself and found it was as easy to use as the promo videos demonstrated.

So I promoted the product and made sales. My EPC while certainly not as high as the top affiliates, they were consistent. Then, just before the first affiliate commissions were due to be paid my account went blank. There was no record of any clicks, no record of any sales – just a row of zeros.

I stared at my affiliate dashboard aghast because this money had been earmarked for a very special project. My heart felt heavy. Then I raised the first of many tickets to customer service. I eventually got paid but the experience left me rather disillusioned.

Now I don’t know if what happened to me was deliberate or accidental but in an interview on how to win affiliate contests I heard Willie Crawford say:

“…all affiliate tracking software is in some way flawed and so whether it’s cookies being deleted or whether it’s just something in the query string…because of hiccups somewhere, a certain percentage of sales over time are not going to be credited to affiliates.”

This is why I like the additional reassurance that using Easy Redirect Script gives me. Using Easy Redirect Script I can quickly and easily set up a variety of cloaked links. and, while I may not be able to track the actual number of sales I achieve I can, at least, prove that I did indeed drive traffic to a particular website.

Also, by logging into one account I can review the performance of any or all of my affiliate campaigns.

It’s so important to be able to track the performance of your affiliate campaigns and to independently  maintain your own statistics. Failure to do this will result in your leaving money on the table and losing affiliate commissions for one reason or another.

And when you take into account that as, Russell Brunson says, most affiliates make “almost $0 per month” then you owe it to yourself to safeguard your commissions.

I said that I wanted to use the commissions from the aforementioned campaign for a special project. Well, because of the length of time it took me to resolve this matter I was unable to do so. And, this brings me to another reason why many affiliate marketers do not earn a significant income from their affiliate commissions.

They simply do not have a strong enough reason why and they do not think of affiliate marketing as a business.  But what if, as Russell Brunson asks, “…you HAD TO feed your family with nothing but your affiliate commissions?”

Then, I think it would be fair to say that you would do more to safeguard your affiliate commissions and boost your income. And with the variety of link cloaking tactics you have at your disposal with Easy Redirect Script plus the ability to monitor the number of clicks a particular campaign generates can certainly help you to achieve these goals.

Easy Redirect Script can be used to create what are called “Promo Redirects“.  What this allows you to do is to display additional content before you send someone who clicks on your link to the final destination.

With Easy Redirect Script this is very easy to do as the video below demonstrates.  However, I’m sure you can appreciate that this is a sophisticated affiliate marketing tactic.  This advanced affiliate marketing tactic is by the top affiliate marketers.

Done effectively, using this tactic can really help to enhance your marketing campaigns and boost your conversions.  You can use it for any page and you can edit it in seconds.

Check out the video below for a quick demonstration of how to set up and use a Promo Redirect.

Please visit website to view premium content

And remember that with Easy Redirect Script you have access to link clicking statistics so you can monitor the performance of your links.  Among other things this can help you to determine which of your campaigns you should focus on to get the maximum return on your investment of time.

Click below to add the Easy Redirect Script to your affiliate marketing arsenal:

The screenshot above summarizes why you should avoid using free URL shortening services.

Someone in the Web Applications forum asked about the message that the free URL shortening service Shrinkster had on its home page:

“We’ll be back soon! We are temporarily offline due to abuse by spammers.”

This message was still being displayed at the time of writing this review.

The person then goes on to ask:

Does anybody know:

If it will come back online to make its URLs available?
Or if the existing short URL codes were transferred to another service?

What do you think?

This is what you risk happening when you use free services to shorten your affiliate links.

The services that such websites provide can, for whatever reason, be withdrawn at any time rendering your links useless.

People think of websites and domains as Virtual Real Estate.  Your affiliate links are just as valuable and so should be protected.

Using a free URL shortener, is like giving your savings to a stranger and asking them to take care of your savings for a while.  You don’t control the service.

Another reason why you shouldn’t use these services is because many ISPs (Internet Service Providers) don’t like them and can shut them down if, as in the case of Shrinkster, and many others, they are overrun with spammers.

And spam is a big problem with free URL shortening services.  Because they’re free it’s very easy to abuse these services.

Not only are these services sometimes being shut down by their hosting companies, major websites such as Wikipedia, Facebook, Craigslist, MySpace can and do block certain URL shorteners.

And there’s just a host of other issues regarding the use of these services.  To start a discussion about this is really like opening a can of worms but here’s another reason why you should avoid these services.

When you use these free services you’re promoting that company.  You are denying yourself the opportunity to brand yourself and products/services you offer.

But what many people forget is that these services are only URL shortening services and so if you use your naked affiliate link, it will be revealed.  These services are not link cloaking services.

Now, I admit, I’ve used services such as Bit.ly and TinyURL.com but that was before I understood the potential consequences of my actions.  In the long-run, it just isn’t worth it.

However, when you use the Easy Redirect Script you’re in the driving seat.  It’s a script that you upload to your domain and so you have complete control.

It’s very easy to use.  In fact, you can be up and running in just 3 easy steps:

1. Download the Easy Redirect Script
2. Upload to your desired domain(s)
3. Create your user name and password

Once you’ve completed these 3 steps you’re all set to create your redirect scripts in a matter of seconds.  And you can relax knowing that you can edit your links when you want to, check your statistics and brand your links.  Being able to do these things will help to dramatically boost your income from affiliate marketing.  Click the link below for full details.

]]> http://www.easyredirectscriptreview.com/easy-redirect-script-versus-free-url-shortening-services/feed/ 0 http://www.easyredirectscriptreview.com/use-easy-redirect-script-for-effective-affiliate-link-cloaking-and-protect-your-affiliate-links/ http://www.easyredirectscriptreview.com/use-easy-redirect-script-for-effective-affiliate-link-cloaking-and-protect-your-affiliate-links/#comments Fri, 11 Feb 2011 14:00:37 +0000 admin http://www.easyredirectscriptreview.com/?p=112

Affiliate Marketers use affiliate link cloaking to limit affiliate commission theft. Yet there are other affiliate marketers who just can’t seem to be bothered to make the effort.

Here’s an example of what I saw on one website I visited recently.

“GO TO ebad2gd8n323xoeajwxnykzw7t.hop.clickbank.net…”

I kid you not!

And, to make matters worse this long, ridiculous link wasn’t even hyperlinked. In other words, if you wanted to visit the website this link was pointing to, you had to cut and paste this link in your web browser.

Would you make that effort? And don’t bother to cut and paste the link above because I’ve changed one of the numbers which actually brings me to another point…

If you get just one letter or number wrong in an affiliate link such as posted above – your link is useless.

But let’s suppose you did take the time and trouble to cut and paste the link, then you would have been redirected to a link with the following structure:

http://PRODUCTNAME.com/index1.php?hop=XYZ

And guess what XYZ represents? It’s the affiliate marketer’s affiliate ID. And so you could easily replace XYZ with your own Clickbank ID and buy the product at a discount rather than allow the affiliate marketer to get the credit.

Now you may be saying to yourself that you would do that but on a recent webinar 54% of the attendees said they would do just that.

54%

OUCH!

But wait…

This case study gets even better.

Guess what this person was promoting? An affiliate link cloaker!

Thankfully, they were not promoting Easy Redirect Script – now that would have been doubly embarrassing.

I thought that they were trying to make a point by displaying this long, convoluted affiliate link and so I scanned their article in search of at least a shortened affiliate link but no that was it.

And how many affiliates do you think are making the mistake of not cloaking their affiliate links and therefore leaving money on the table?

A recent survey has shown that affiliates are losing 43-78% of their commissions as a result of commission theft by committing mistakes like the one mentioned above.

Looking at this from another perspective this means that, without doing any extra work, as an affiliate marketer you could potentially DOUBLE your affiliate commissions simply by using an effective link cloaking redirect script such as Easy Redirect Script.

Click the link below for full details and demo videos.

There are lots of other cool ways in which you can use this script to further boost your affiliate commissions so check it out.