Cloak Your Affiliate Link for FREE!

As an affiliate marketer, you probably would like to have the links to your affiliate offers appear to be links from your own domain. It’s also a good idea to change the link appearance to make it a little harder for your links to be hijacked. Affiliate links usually have this format: affiliateid.hop.clickbank.net

It looks much better, and many times increases your sales, if the link appears to stay in your site: www.mydomain.com/special-discount

Many new marketers try to use a URL shortener to hide the affiliate links, but to most users they look odd, and make them wonder where you are sending them, and are expecting it to be a big sales pitch. Even though TinyURL, Bit.ly, and other shorteners have gained a lot of popularity, they may not be your best choice for marketing on your blog or website. Their place is in Twitter where you must keep your URL’s short.

You can also buy cloaking programs to change your links, and most of them work great.  The problem with them is the cost. Most of them are expensive, and for a new marketer, may be more than your budget can afford.

An inexpensive and very effective way to change your links is to use a simple PHP script. You can create your own, or you can download the script I found and use it for your affiliate links. Here are the steps to download and use this  free link cloaker script:

1. Download the script from this location
2. Once you have download the script, upload it to your domain FTP and run the installcloaker.php file.
3. Create a MySQL database for this application on your hosting control panel. 
4. Put your database info on provided field (You can leave the table name blank), and press “Submit” when you are done
   
5. You should see the successful message on the next page if you done correctly.
   
6. To start cloaking your link, run the newcloak.php file from the script location on your browser. Put your affiliate link on “Link” and your affiliate keyword on “Keyword” field.
   
7. Press “Submit” and you should be getting your new affiliate cloaked link.

This script does require you have your own domain name, and paid hosting for your site.  This is one reason some people use TinyUrl or another URL shortener, to save money while they are starting out. I always recommend using paid hosting and your own domain name as soon as you can.

Using a PHP script to modify your affiliate links is a great way to make your product offers appear to be from your own site, and increase your conversion rates.

Moving Big Files from a Hosting Server to Another

At some point in time, you will probably need to move your website to a new host, whether it is to save money, for new features, or to increase your storage and bandwidth. The process of moving your website to a new host can seem very intimidating.  You want to make sure you get all the files moved, without bringing down your existing site first. If you have a slow or non-reliable internet connection, then downloading your site to your local PC, and then uploading to the new host can be time consuming and may fail.

It would be much better if your could use the high speed connections of the two ISP’s, and transfer directly from one server to the other. This will be much faster, and definitely a more reliable way to transfer your site. The best way to accomplish this is using LFTP.

If you’d like to try this method of transfer, you’ll need to verify your hosting is Linux based (most are), and that you have SSH access to your account. Also, check with your ISP and make sure the LFTP command is available. Once you have verified those few items from your new hosting company, you are ready to move your site.

Here are the steps for mirroring your site with LFTP:

1. Access the destination server using your SSH access. You can use SSH client like PuTTY for it.
2. Connect to the source server using this command :
    lftp -u username, password, ftpsite
   Where :
   username is your source server FTP username
   password is your source server FTP password
   ftpsite is your destination hostname
3. Then, after the FTP connection is established, type this command to transfer the data from your source server to destination server :
   mirror /path/to/source_directory path/to/target_directory
4. The transfer process will begin after you type it.

A few things you need to watch out for, first, make sure you choose the correct directory structure for your new host, or you may end up with the files nested inside of another directory.  Secondly, if you are using any database driven sites, like Joomla, OSCommerce, Mambo, and Wordpress, the database will not transfer properly. All the files will mirror across perfectly, but the database will not be up and running. LFTP will not transfer a password protected folder either. You would need to remove the password, transfer the folder, and then assign a password once the folder is transferred.

Even though there are a few shortcomings to the LFTP mirror, it is one of the best ways to quickly move your entire website from one ISP to another. It is a fast and reliable way to move your website.