Ninjutsu was developed as a collection of fundamental survivalist techniques during political turmoil in ancient Japan. The main character (Nin 忍) is translated as stealth, secretiveness, endurance, and perseverance, while the second character (Jutsu 術) means art or technique. Based on these interpretations, It would be safe to say that most successful affiliate marketers practice some form of Ninjutsu in one way, shape or form – they just don’t know it yet. Now it’s time for me to school all you greasy gurus on The Ninja Mindset and how it relates to affiliate marketing:
You have to be stealth amongst your competition.
You must be secretive with your top performing niches.
You need endurance to adapt with the changes in technology.
You must persevere and be consistent with your actions and words.
You need to build your own technique using proven fundamentals.
There are 18 disciplines that must be mastered within Ninjutsu training, and today we are going to talk about the 11th discipline, Shinobi-iri, which is the art of stealth and entering methods. Stealth is often overlooked in the ebooks of affiliate marketing, but it’s a vital skill when it comes to protecting your links from hijackers, as well as making it less painful to update existing links – should your affiliate networks change anything. This is where affiliate link redirecting can make your life easier while increasing the efficiency of your online business.
When a targeted individual ends up on your blog or website, ultimately you want them to do one thing – click. Taking into consideration that most androids and shopaholics surfing the web are savvy enough to recognize a shifty looking url, your contextual links will not perform as well as they could because of the long-ass links companies like Amazon provide you with. Here’s an example of bad link vs good link:
http://www.amazon.com/jd3ekd88payme76=383i3f9jdsuperfly.html
or
http://www.yoursite.com/go/jump.php?m=amazon
Pretty obvious right? Now there are tons of software scripts that you can purchase such as Affiliate Link Cloaker which is $59, or Amazing Link Cloaker for $65, blah, blah, blah (funny how they sound the same). Here’s what I say, visit SteveDawson.com and check out his PHP Affiliate Jump Script – it’s free and it works like a charm. I know zip about PHP and I downloaded the script, and had it configured in 15 minutes. Here’s what you need to do step-by-step:
- Visit the site and download the script (jump.zip)
- Save the zip file to your desktop or folder of choice and extract the contents to your desired location (I have every folder on my server duplicated locally on my computer, so it’s easier when uploading). You should get a file called jump.php
- Log onto your FTP or web hosting provider (Godaddy, Hostgator,etc..) and create a new directory within the root (if your root folder is “Poverty101.net” you want to create a folder within there called “referral” or “go” or something along those lines – just don’t name the folder “redirect” for obvious reasons!
- Double click the jump.php file that you saved on your computer and replace the the required lines of script with your affiliate link information. Below you’ll see 3 lines that start with an “if” statement. On the first “if” statement line you want to replace the area I’ve colored blue with your domain name and directory. So if you created the directory “referral” then you want to enter within the quotes http://www.poverty101.net/referral/ – and don’t forget the trailing forward slash. That’s it for the first line.
- The second and third lines of code starting with “if” can be copied and pasted as many times as needed for each affiliate product you have (for example if you have 15 affiliate products, you will have 15 “if” statement lines below the first one) All you do from here is copy and paste as many lines as needed, replace the area I’ve colored in yellow with your ID of choice for the product like “wordtracker” or “hostgator”, and then within the quotes replace the url I’ve colored green with the affiliate link for each related product. It’s that simple.
$m = $_GET[‘m’];
if ($m == “”) {$link = “http://www.stevedawson.com/mobiles/“;} // Default Blank
if ($m == “Just Phones“) {$link = “http://www.awin1.com/awclick.php?mid=97&id=38362“;}
if ($m == “UKPhoneShop“) {$link = “http://tracker.tradedoubler.com/click?p=985&a=949731&g=5119“;}
Once you’ve updated the jump.php file on your computer, save it and upload it into the directory you created. Once you’ve uploaded the file, test it out. Type into your browser http://www.yoursitename.com/directoryname/jump.php?m=productname and witness the stealth madness of this awesome script. Click here to see it in action.
The Ninja Mindset can be adapted to any area of your business, just as I did above. I knew I needed to protect my assets so I did some research, tested a few things out, and now I can be comfortable putting affiliate links out there knowing that they are safe and stealth – while proving you guys with some great content at the same time. It’s a win-win situation!
Cheers,
Elijah