Internet Marketing with Mike Gillis

Many people use sites such as tinyurl.com or other url shortening sites when they are promoting affiliate products or recommended programs or services. (I have been guilty of this too) But you can increase your web presence using your own domain name and even get it ranked in the search engines.

Have you ever received an email with a link such as:
http://mikegillis.com/recommends
http://mikegillis.com/recommended
http://mikegillis.com/likes

I’m sure by now you have seen many other marketers doing this as well.

I have recently found some of my recommended links getting ranked in the top 10 of Google using this strategy. I’m going to briefly go over how I go about doing this.

First of all, I’m going to assume you already have your own domain name. Now you will want to create a folder called recommends, recommended, likes, or whatever you prefer. For each product or service that you recommend you will include in a sub folder.

Example: http://mikegillis.com/recommends/InternetMarketingTools (this is one of my older sites) Make sure to keep your folder name in all lower case letters and no spaces. The capitals in the example above is using anchor text in order to make each word separate and easier to read.

You can name the sub folder whatever you want, think about the keywords for the product your recommending and try to optimize for it. Inside of that folder you want to include an index.htm file, this file will be temporary until we create our cloaked link.

I use the Link Cloaker by GLH Software, all you need to do is: enter in the title of the page, I usually use the same title that’s on the main page for that product. Then insert your affiliate link and name the file something related to the product so you can find it easily. After filling out those 3 boxes, download it to your computer.

Next you will need to use cpanel or a ftp program to upload the file to your server where your created the index.htm file, delete the temporary index.htm file and rename your cloaked link to index.htm, now you should be able to go to the sub folder and see the product page with your affiliate link embedded in the page.

http://yourdomain.com/recommends/product

You have the option to include a blank html page in your recommends folder or leave it blank so if someone wants to check out all your recommended files, they can. This is how I prefer to do it, as it may end up making me more commissions.

See here for more recommendations

Tags: cloaking links, increase web presence, promoting affiliate products, recommended links

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 at 5:23 am and is filed under Internet Marketing Strategies, Marketing Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.