I’m not subscribed to more than a handful of these lists any more (in an effort to combat information overload and outrageous bullshit) and I keep up to date with what’s going on in the marketplace via the excellent JVNotify which is all you need.

Even so, the physical product push is becoming almost as bad as the last great thing – anyone else remember the death of Internet marketing and the rise of mobile marketing? Or the death of Google and the supremacy of Facebook? Sheesh!

So what’s it to be? Physical products or information products? The answer, obviously, is both! Why on earth would you ditch one multi-billion dollar market in favour of another? Exploit both, for heavens sake, and don’t believe for a second method X is better than method Y because it just ain’t so.

Why would you ditch Clickbank and Paydot.com where you can pull in 50% – 75% commissions per sale? Where’s the logic? Yeah sure, there’s a lot of competition but do these physical product marketers seriously think selling flat screen TVs or Kindles is a walk in the park?

Come on! The same rules hold true no matter what type of product you are trying to move. Find the products with big demand and low competition and you’re going to make money. It doesn’t matter if the product arrives by post or is downloaded immediately. If people want it and you can get ranked on the search engines then you’ll be able to shift it.

On all my affiliate sites I make sure I have a good mix of the informational and physical. Freebie ebooks are still a great way to build a list. PLR information products can quickly be turned into revenue streams that complement physical products. An example, promote WII accessories on the physical side and game tips and tricks or other information as a downloadable product. Use your list to double up the revenue.

Also consider, how many times will somebody buy a physical product? The answer is once, until it wears out. Yes you can promote accessories and add-ons and you should. But don’t underestimate the power of the information product in supplementing those physical items.

Have you ever bought a top of the line home cinema system, had an expert set it up for you and then thrown the operating manual against the wall in frustration the first time you needed to configure or troubleshoot the thing? Enter the information product. Whenever you have a problem with anything at all note it down and create a product, then stick it online. It’s guaranteed if you’ve experienced the problem then somebody else has too. Probably many people in fact.

How many times have you trawled the Internet looking for solutions to obscure problems? You can’t even figure out what search you should enter, right? You’re not alone. Hours later you might have an answer but maybe not. Would you pay $7 or $9 or $12 to save yourself the bother? I would and I do. Regularly. So do other people, I’m betting. That’s supposed to be a big part of this game, helping people. Well how are you helping people by throwing away the information product in favour of physical products?

You get my point. Physical products or information products? A good mix of both will serve you well and give you an advantage and don’t be swayed by $2K online promises and misdirections.

For whatever reason, maybe WordPress updated something or maybe I wrote over the file, .htaccess was reset to its initial state thereby breaking every affiliate link on my site.

I can’t claim it has affected my sales because I don’t have any, but I can imagine what it might be like if the same thing happened to a frequent seller. Mind you, I’m sure such a person would notice quicker than I did given the varying amounts at stake.

Moral of the story is to check that .htaccess file after any significant change you make to the site and also following any WordPress upgrade. Common sense really but I’d hate to be the cause of anybody losing revenue.

Also, as per Google’s request, I have made all my affiliate links “nofollow” and added an exclusion to the virtual /route/ folder in robots.txt just in case I ever forget the manual process.

Each day is a learning day.

Just to be sure we all know what’s being discussed, an affiliate link is a link on your web site or blog to a sales page or process on a different web site with a different domain name.

An affiliate link might look something like this:
http://www.nastylink.com?aff=1234

That’s an ugly link and it reveals your affiliate ID to the general public. The argument goes that some potential buyers might be put off when they see it. Either they don’t like the fact they are changing to another web site or they just don’t like clicking on affiliate links and prefer to deal direct with the vendor.

Some suggest these types of links make your business look unprofessional and others recount scary stories about affiliate link hijacking and other types of link fraud that are made possible due to your affiliate details being readily available in the link.

I don’t have a business yet so I can’t say from experience if these warnings about customer attitudes or trading risks are true. But enough senior marketers make the case so I’ll go with their opinion and cloak my links.

A cloaked link is an interim link that is presented in a much friendlier and more secure manner which then redirects to the real affiliate link, meaning the real affiliate link will never be seen by people using your site.

For example, we might produce a link such as:
http://www.my-web-site.com/route/nicelink

We have that link redirect, behind the scenes, to the nasty link (or cloaked link) given in the first example. This redirection process is handled by the web server and is transparent to the user.

It probably all sounds very complicated but if you are using WordPress the process is quite simple. In fact there are plugins available that do this for you. If you don’t know what a .htaccess file is or have never heard of PHP then definitely use a plugin, don’t go messing with your web server!

I haven’t used a plugin because I want a method that allows me the greatest flexibility in the future and because the task really isn’t that difficult if you have a little experience. So I’ve decided to roll my own.

The process involves creating a simple PHP script and pasting a single line into your .htaccess file. The .htaccess file contains configuration and file handling instructions for the web server on which your site is running. If you are going to use this script then make sure you follow along precisely as any errors in this file will likely cause your web server to fall over. So make a copy of your .htaccess file first so you can revert to it if things go wrong. Honestly – make a copy!

But first the PHP script. Open up wordpad or notepad and copy/ paste the following:

<?php
if (isset($_REQUEST['id'])) {
  $id = $_REQUEST['id'];
  $id = trim(strtolower($id));
  $url = false;
  switch ($id) {
    case 'nicelink': // Example label
    $url = 'http://www.nastylink.com?aff=1234'; // The real affiliate link
    break;
  }
  if ($url) {
    header('Location: ' . $url);
    exit;
  } else {
    // Can't find the affiliate ID so either exit or maybe put some
    // code here to redirect to an error page or another sales opportunity
    exit;
  }
}
?>

Now decide on a label for the affiliate link you want to cloak, it can be anything provided you haven’t already used it for another affiliate link. Don’t use spaces or any other special characters in your labels, stick to letters, numbers and underscores or dashes. In the example we choose the label nicelink but you should pick something more meaningful that helps you quickly identify your affiliate links. For example, you might use hostgator for your Hostgator affiliate link. Go ahead and edit the script replacing the example label with your own. Now replace the example affiliate link with the affiliate link you want to cloak.

These are the only two parts (marked in red text) that you need to edit, leave everything else unchanged. Save this file as mp-route.php to the folder in which WordPress is installed. You can change the file name if you like but that means you will also have to reflect the change in your .htaccess file, so for simplicity I advise sticking with the suggested file name.

In the same folder you should find your .htaccess file. Once you have backed it up, open it and you should see something like this (for a basic WordPress 2.9 installation).

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

There may be other information in the file but it’s the BEGIN WordPress… END WordPress section you are looking for.

Insert the line highlighted in red below, directly after RewriteBase / so you end up with the following.

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^route/(.*)$ mp-route.php?id=$1 [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

Immediately go and test your home page in a browser to ensure your site is still operating correctly. If not, restore your .htaccess file from the backup you made earlier and retrace your steps to ensure you followed all procedures precisely.

If all is well you should now be able to use your new cloaked links. In the example, use http://www.my-web-site.com/route/nicelink in your posts and the web server will automatically redirect it to http://www.nastylink.com?aff=1234 without the user being any the wiser. Do you see the label nicelink at the end of the friendly URL? Don’t add a trailing slash, by the way.

Your friendly links must always start http://www.my-web-site.com/route/ and then you just add the label you have chosen, which gives us http://www.my-web-site.com/route/nicelink. Obviously change the www.my-web-site.com part to your real domain name.

That takes care of one link, but what if you need more? To add another cloaked link go and edit the PHP file you created, like so.

<?php
if (isset($_REQUEST['id'])) {
  $id = $_REQUEST['id'];
  $id = trim(strtolower($id));
  $url = false;
  switch ($id) {
    case 'nicelink': // Example label
    $url = 'http://www.nastylink.com?aff=1234'; // The real affiliate link
    break;

    case 'nicelink2':
    $url = 'http://www.anotheraffiliate.com?aff=5678';
    break;

  }
  if ($url) {
    header('Location: ' . $url);
    exit;
  } else {
    // Can't find the affiliate ID so either exit or maybe put some
    // code here to redirect to an error page or another sales opportunity
    exit;
  }
}
?>

The blue section of the example script is just a copy/ paste of the preceding section but with a new label and affiliate link. Copy and paste again for as many links as required.

If you have a whole bunch of links you could put them in a database and look them up from this script, or you could add tracking code or do pretty much anything you want with the links before sending traffic to the affiliate. But that’s for advanced users only.

If this works for you or you have any problems or spot a flaw, drop me some feedback.

First thing I decided to do is setup a blog and here’s one I made earlier. It’s virgin territory right now, including the terribly bland default WordPress theme. I’ll do something about that later but for now at least I’m up and running.

I used namecheap.com (aff. link) to register the domain, I’d heard GoDaddy is a very bad choice for Internet marketers, which is fortunate because in the past they would have been my first choice. Apparently they are a bit trigger happy on spam complaints even when those complaints are totally unjustified. I was also told it is nearly impossible to transfer your domain away from them once they have it in their clutches.

Anyway, namecheap.com (aff. link) seems to be perfectly adequate and the domains are cheap enough. Just go to their site, enter the domain name you want, if the domain is available add it to the shopping cart, create a new account and pay using your credit card or Paypal. Super simple.

Get a .com if you can or (if .com is not available) a .net, .org or .us/ .co.uk in that order and try to include your primary keyword or key phrase in the domain as this can give your SEO (search engine optimisation) ranking a boost, so I’m told.

For example, if you are selling fishing rods it would be ideal to get the domain name fishingrods.com, which is almost certainly already taken but you get the point. A rule I’ve broken with this web site, if you notice, but I won’t be relying too heavily on SEO to promote the site. I’ll be trying different techniques which I’ll describe in later posts.

I also joined namecheap’s affiliate program with a few mouse clicks, no fuss at all, and I have used these links on this page – just so you know. Any link followed by (aff. link) is an affiliate link which means I get a commission from the seller if you use my link to purchase a product or service. This commission is paid by the seller not you. Well after all, I am trying to become an Internet Marketer, so I won’t be missing any opportunities if I can help it. I also cloaked these links, a process I’ll explain in a later post for those who don’t already know why this is necessary or how to go about it.

I’m a newbie marketer but I do have a strong background in I.T. and I’ll be putting it to use wherever possible and explaining what I’m up to as I go.

So that’s the domain registration sorted out. Next time I’ll talk about hosting and how I created this blog and how it’s possible to do it with virtually no specialised knowledge, provided you choose the right host.