Yesterday I created a simple (very, very simple) script to allow Clickbank merchants to redirect their hoplink to different products.

This is beneficial because it allows you to run affiliate programs for up to 50 products from one account, without creating a distracting intermediary page listing all your products. Running all your programs from one account also will increase the gravity of your account, making it look more appealing to affiliates in the Clickbank marketplace.

Today I’m going to create a script to go along with yesterdays redirection code to fix another problem I have with Clickbank. It’s nice to have a lot of affiliates linking to your products, but they’re not really linking to you. They’re linking to hop.clickbank.net.

Since we’re already giving affiliates custom codes to link to our products, why not add a second redirection script so that those custom affiliate codes give us the link love instead of Clickbank?

Yesterday we created a file called hop.php, and once we were done, our affiliate hoplink codes looked a little like this:

http://AFFILIATE.PUBLISHER.hop.clickbank.net/?prod=1

Today, we’re going to create a file called go.php which will bounce visitors to the correct hoplink from our site. The hoplink directs those visitors to hop.php back on our domain, and hop.php directs them to the correct sales page, wherever that may be. If the average visitor even had a clue how much jumping around they were doing in the background, they’d feel a little bit like Tigger. Fortunately it will generally be instantaneous and invisible to most users.
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A close friend of mine is using Clickbank to run an affiliate program for his product, but with the upcoming arrival of a second product he wants to promote via Clickbank, he ran into a problem.

Clickbank lets you promote up to 50 products, but you only get one hoplink for your entire account… that is, no matter how many products you have, the basic hoplink your affiliates will use will always land on the same page.

The three ways to deal with this limitation are:

1. Create a new Clickbank account for each product
   However, this would mean paying a $50 setup fee for each product, and would require logging into Clickbank multiple times to check sales and stats, and worrying about multiple Clickbank cheques each month.
2. Create an intermediary page with a link to each of the products he has available.
   It isn’t necessarily a bad idea to have a page like this, but requiring all prospects coming via an affiliate to go through an extra page before seeing the offer is bound to reduce conversions and cause confusion.
3. Use a script to create custom redirection to the appropriate products.
   This was the route that offered the best potential. I found a number of scripts that did exactly this, ranging from $17 to $97.

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As the end of August approaches I suddenly realized I’ve been terribly negligent about this blog for the entire month. But bringing myself to blog while the weather is still warm and the days are still long seemed to be just a little short of impossible.

But before the month is up, I want to point you to a few products.

First, The Wealthy Blogger has posted that he’s raising the price of his very cool Google Subscribed Links Toolkit for WordPress in a few days in order to start his affiliate program. If you want to grab it at $14.99, do it now!

Secondly, if you haven’t yet seen Market Samurai, you ought to give the trial a run. It is a very, very nice piece of market and niche analysis software for the price.

Neither product is linked here with an affiliate link. They get the nod on their own merits.

Just a quick note to say that The Wealthy Blogger has released his Google Subscribed Links Toolkit for WordPress.

It is absolutely awesome. The plugin is newly coded, designed for 2.5.x WordPress blogs, but is backwards compatible so if you’re still running a 2.3.x blog it will still work like a dream.

Aside from the plugin, the kit contains complete instructions from install to setup of your feed on Google. It simplifies a complex process quite well, and warns you when things might take a while to happen so you don’t panic and think you’ve done something wrong.

It also includes 10 nice 125×125 pixel banners that you can use to promote your subscribed links on your blog. That’s handy because the size of the banner Google offers is in a size that is probably a little awkward in many blog designs. 125×125 is quickly becoming the size of choice, especially for a lot of probloggers.

The toolkit also includes an AWESOME report offering five brilliant ways to get people running to subscribe to your Google links. These are five REALLY good ideas.

The price is cheaper than dirt, so if you’ve got a WordPress blog, it’s something you should be jumping at. I’m sure you’ll find it worthwhile.

Click here to check out the sales page.

I promised some results in my last post about Adsense Shield. I’ve been slow to write, not only because I’m on vacation, but because I’m not sure WHAT to report.

In case you haven’t read the last post, Adsense Shield is a script that is supposed to protect your Adsense site from clickbomb attacks… where someone clicks on your ads over and over in an attempt to get your Adsense account shut down. I set the script up on one of my sites to see if it affected overall Adsense earnings.

First of all, I haven’t noticed a drop in clicks, CTR, eCPM, or earnings for the site I added the code to. So, if it is working to protect my site from Adsense clickbombing, it’s not having a detrimental effect on revenue at all.

I do feel weird that it’s a piece of software I can’t really test once its installed, since doing so would mean I’d be clicking on my own ads. So, I’m trusting that the absence of error messages is a good sign and the script is working on my pages as well as it did on the test page.

Now that I’ve seen that it doesn’t decrease revenue, I’ll probably add it to my other sites when I’m back from vacation. I’m not at all sure how it’ll work on a WordPress blog, but I’ll figure that out when I get to it.