Internet Business Blog

Text Link Ads have quietly switched from using TinyURLs as affiliate links with a JavaScript-based solution that obfuscates your raw affiliate URLs. I say quietly because I’ve not yet received any communication about it from Text Link Ads informing me about the changeover, but they’re right there in the TLA control panel as graphical banners, text links and RSS buttons.

To an affiliate, obfuscation can be a useful tool as it disguises raw affiliate links and prevents hijacking (when people remove or replace your referral ID before making a purchase meaning you don’t get any credit for the sale), but this particular implementation seems pointless as the raw affiliate URL is displayed in plain text in the web browser’s status bar when you hover over one of these new links.

Up until a few days ago, your TLA affiliate links were presented to you as TinyURLs. Now, logging into your Text Link Ads affiliate section, you’ll be presented with a variety of different options for where your affiliate links actually lead to. Choices include the TLA home page, $100 promotion page or the package details page of one of your own inventory websites.

Whilst this might seem like an improvement, the format of the links restrict them to being displayed in web pages only. I can’t figure out why an option for a plain text link allowing the affiliate some modicum of control has been omitted. This new JavaScript-based system isn’t email friendly, has to be displayed on a web page, doesn’t prevent hijacking and obviously isn’t going to work very well in a non-JavaScript environment.

Here’s the code for a typical, new-styled TLA affiliate link:

<script type="text/javascript">
function affiliateLink(str){ str = unescape(str); var r = '';
for(var i = 0; i < str.length; i++) r +=
String.fromCharCode(7^str.charCodeAt(i));document.write(r);}
affiliateLink('%3Bf%27ouba%3A%25ossw%3D%28%28ppp%29sb%7Fs*
knil*fct%29dhj%28tsfusbuXlns%29wow8uba%3A40127%259%23677%27
ni%27AUBB%27Knilt%3B%28f9');
</script>

I would have used one of my new TLA affiliate links in this post, but they don’t appear to display properly in WordPress either however, I did manage to extract the link by right-clicking on the above when it’s displayed in a browser and copying the link.

If you fancy $100 of free text link advertising, give Text Link Ads a try.

If you had to update all of your old style TLA links on your WordPress blog to the TinyURL format using SQL then it’s time to start controlling your own links with your own redirects rather than relying on third party services.

Technorati Tags: Text Link Ads, TLA, Affiliate Marketing

Today, I received an email newsletter from Text Link Ads, part of which read,

If you are ready for an ad that can drive traffic and raise your natural search engine rankings head on over to TLA now

If I ran a search engine and I was aiming to deliver the most relevant results to my users then I’d also be concerned about people trying to take advantage of the careful developed ranking algorithms I’d put in place.

Whilst some websites using paid links might deserve a rankings boost i.e. they’re relevant for user search terms, but perhaps don’t yet have enough back-links to lift them into the limelight of the first three pages, paid links allow any website with a marketing budget to get those improvements regardless of whether or not they’re deserved.

Back-links are a handy natural voting system. Using back-links as votes may not be the perfect voting system, but it’s very effective. Is paying for votes any more ethical on the Internet than it is in the real world?

Technorati Tags: Paid links, Google, Yahoo!, MSN, TLA

Love them or hate them, those long sales letters are here to stay by the look of things. For marketing products especially, they seem to work well enough that top sellers continue to use them.

Perhaps the market has gotten used to seeing sales information presented in such a linear fashion. When a story is being told, as these types of product sales websites often do, it seems logical to try and keep the reader focussed on the narrative and not be distracted by something which might detract from making the sale.

When the product is a software application aimed at web developers, does this type of long sales letter approach still work?

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A couple of days ago, I started developing a new website that’s covering a topic where there’s plenty of money being spent and lots of interest. It’s a popular industry, but this particular segment of the market isn’t too saturated with existing competition. I’m thinking it’ll be relatively easy to obtain good search engine rankings for as this type of site is always popular and very linkable.

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Back in February of this year, I launched a keyword tool that I’d developed to help save me time setting up Google AdWords campaigns. Rather than some of the grand launches you can see from a mile off, Keyword Permutator (KP) trickled onto the Internet with little promotional effort on my part.

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