Don’t Forget Your Cloak
Link cloaking protects your commissions.
A link cloaker disguises an affiliate hoplink, and makes it look like a normal link to a webpage on your own website.
There are two reasons for using a link cloaker:
- It stops the scumbags who use nasty parasite software to hi-jack affiliate referrals and steal their commission.
- It takes out all the ClickBank hoplink gobbledegook, so it looks less like you’re just trying to sell something.
There are few link cloakers out there, but having looked around, the one we recommend is ‘Covert Links’.
Covert Links protects you from parasite software and is also good value for money and very easy to use. They also have good support too.
Here is where to get it: www.covertlinks.com/
However if you join an affiliate community (which we strongly recommend) you might get link cloaking software included as part the price of their membership package.
What Is PPC?
Pay Per Click means that you pay a certain amount to Google every time someone clicks on your AdWords ad.
The cost of the click is set by a blind auction on the Adwords website and depends on the popularity of the keywords you are bidding on and how much other advertisers are willing to pay to be high up the stack of AdWords ads to the right of the organic search results for those keywords.
(By the way, a ‘keyword’ can be a single word or a phrase)
Research says that you need to be in positions one to four to get a good click-thru rate (more than 2 clicks per 100 page views).
There are a couple of tricks with Adwords.
- Find keywords that have low bid prices, but convert well. In other words find phrases that people use when they want to buy, not when they’re just browsing for entertainment.
- Success with AdWords is all about testing – seeing which keywords and ads convert the best compared to others, and then putting your money into the ones that perform best.