Bukisa is a bit like Squidoo.
It is a convenient, one-stop community where members can find information and educational content. Content includes articles, videos, presentations, audio recordings and image slideshows. In addition, members are paid ongoing royalties for their shared knowledge contributions.
I joined Squidoo in its early stages and didn’t really follow it up, but a friend of mine has written many lens (web pages) for squidoo and makes quite bit of money. There are many new features.
The idea is to write about a topic and you share the revenues from Amazon and Google clicks with Squidoo. I don’t know about you, but my Google clicks are not producing much money at all any more. You can also use text linked ads provided by Squidoo.
I recently wrote about a trip I took to Castlemaine and a review of the DVD ‘Lilies’ .
You need to write quite a few lens to get your ranking up. There is provision to share on Twitter and Facebook and Squidoo takes care of your Google ranking too.
You should keep your web site up to date. One task, which I have just completed, is to check that all your external (and internal) links are still alive. There’s nothing more unprofessional looking than clicking on a link to see it go to a 404 page.
The other task is to check how your affiliates are doing. There are a lot of mergers of affiliate programs and many disappear. They don’t let you know this necessarily. I’m having to go through many of my links on ozwebhub to delete old ones and to change code for affiliates I recommend.
I use Xenu Sleuth as a link checker. Often makes mistakes, but that’s easy to check. Link checkers are not much good for blogs which are ‘no folllow’ however, as all those blogs will show up as ‘not found’.
I came across a web site which performs a similar function to my own but lists so many more things. It’s a simple site design with links under categories such as web design, web site maintenance, tutorials, css generators, colours, affiliates, web site validation and much much more.
It’s called agency tool
Great site even though it is in competition to mine.
I’ve just read a great post from Rockfuse
It is about the ethics of affiliate link cloaking. This is when you use some method which disguises a referral id of yours to a product you are an affiliate of, from which you earn a commission if someone buys via your link. I have often wondered how much better I’d go at selling things by doing this.
My main concern was not whether it is ethical or not though, but whether by cloaking the link, the referral information will go through. Apparently it does.
Frankly, if I see something that I want to buy and it has an obvious referral id in the link, I will go back to the site after without that referral link, unless I like the site and it offers me something. So if I do that, so do others.
The products I advertise on my web site do not have cloaked links, but if you visit my affiliate page, you will see down the bottom a LinkProtection software link. This is an exe file, but there is no spyware. This application will encrypt your referral link.
For blogs one can’t use the php method as far as I can see. So for blogs one could use either snipurl or tinyurl. I’ve noticed tiny url being used a lot these days, not always for referral link cloaking but for long titles in blogs. Both of these sites can be dragged to your browser toolbar for easy access.
Now the PHP method for web sites.
You can use a jump php script which you will find here
You can use a redirect in a .htaccess file
or use this script:
<?php
$url=’http://affiliatelinkhere’;
header(“Location:$url”);
exit()”;
?>
Save as something.php
Upload to your server.
To link to your product that you are an affiliate of
< a href=”http://www.domain.com/something.php“affiliate name</a>
I’ve been a member of Clickbank for several years as an affiliate. One year I sold quite a lot of affiliate products but the amount was under the US $100 threshold. This is where affiliate programs catch you out.
But what does Clickbank do about it? They delete money from this sum if there is inactivity for 90 days, then they delete more if there is further inactivity, so I lost most of it and will never get to $100 at this rate.
I only have one or two clickbank products on two of my sites. This is probably not the answer. I should pile up my web sites with all clickbank products as I have seen others do. But I’m afraid I don’t trust them.
Besides, these days, I can’t imagine who sells anything from affiliate programs. Amazon is having a profit problem at the moment so if all their affiliate links don’t bring in enough profit, I can’t imagine how the other programs are going. Also, everyone knows the big online stores now. Why would they go through your links. And, how many times have you thought about buying something you see from a web site and delete the obvious referral id.
I worry about cloaking links because a) they may not be counted by the affiliate program and b) Google may detect it and ban you.