ClickBanking Success

I reached a bit of a milestone with my online marketing efforts recently.

For the first time since I started using ClickBank last year, I went two whole weeks making at least one sale per day on ClickBank…

This was mainly done through email marketing (double opt-in subscribers only) and since this screen shot was taken I’ve actually done even better…though there was one odd Monday when I did not sell anything.

There are many different high-quality products available to promote through ClickBank and if you are an online marketer who has not been using it, you should definitely try it. They are kind of bad about the fees and the return policy, but they send checks on time every two weeks.

Watch for future posts covering exact details of how I got these sales results.

Simple Affiliate Link Hiding Method

If you do any affiliate marketing, you know that the links you have to use can get pretty long. For example, if I wanted to promote Price Headley’s Trend Strategist Handbook on this site, the link might look something like this:

http://hillseven.pricetsh.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=EIDPOST

Something that long is a bit awkward to send to people, but there is a very easy way to get around this problem. It’s so simple that it’s hard to notice and you’ll wonder why you had not thought of it before…

The answer is simply: Redirects.

Instead of sending out that long link, I could simply set up a redirect from http://eidoan.com/tsh/ to the full affiliate link. That way, all the customer sees is the small link and perhaps does not even realize that you are selling it as an affiliate. This is especially helpful if you are a text-only email marketer who cannot use HTML to change links to “Click Here” or a graphic.

I have also seen some large affiliate marketers register domain names simply to redirect them to one single affiliate product. They take the domain of the product itself and register a new domain that is just slightly different in some way (perhaps an extra letter or have the words rearranged) and then direct that entire domain to their affiliate link. This can be set up in five minutes or less and that new domain can be used in promo emails.

How to do this:

• If you use cPanel it is very simple. Just log in a go down to “Redirects.”
• There will be a box to enter what you want the link to be, from the example above, you would simply enter “tsh.”
• Then below that, there is a box where you enter your affiliate link.
• Hit the Save button and your new redirect will show up on a list.

If you want to redirect a whole domain you can either use cPanel and just leave the first box blank, or log in to your domain registrar’s account and there should be a simple interface that allows you to redirect the domain to a specific link.

For GoDaddy.com, you simply click on the “My Domain Names” menu item and then click on the domain you want to change. Here it is called “Forwarding” instead of “Redirects.” Make sure your name servers for this domain are set to GoDaddy’s defaults and click on the “Domain is not forwarded.” link. Then simply paste in your affiliate link.

Remember, this is good for masking long links of any kind. I also use this method for some of my Google AdWords Cross-channel Campaigns conversion tracking links and other very long links.

Irish Family History

I should have posted this a week ago, but I had to verify a couple things first…

The main reason for my trip to Chicago late last month was for a family reunion for the Kenneally side of my family (that would be my father’s mother). Probably doesn’t sound very exciting, but I was looking forward to talking to a certain relative, named Shaun. He provided some further details on top of what I already knew about my great-grandfather, here is a summary:

- My great-grandfather, Daniel Kenneally, was born on March 5, 1900 near Mallow, Ireland.

- He became an early member of the Irish Republican Army in his late teens.

- Daniel fought in at least one street battle and was shot in the leg, around the time of the Bloody Sunday conflict of 1920.

- After being wounded and whatever else he might have done around that time, he quickly left Ireland from the Port of Cobh for Canada (Canada was easier to get into at the time).

- He stayed in Canada for a few years, where he met my great-grandmother. They eventually moved to a farm in Wisconsin, had children, and of course grandchildren, one of them being Shaun (Shaun was the son of one of Daniel’s sons, my father was the son of one of Daniel’s daughters).

- Shaun served in the Marines and was selected to be a guard at Camp David in the late 1980’s.

- When the Secret Service did their background check on Shaun, they found out that his grandfather, Daniel, had been involved with the IRA, had been in combat, and was wanted for “undisclosed crimes” in Ireland.

- Daniel was still alive at the time and Shaun was denied the security clearance because of the close family relationship to someone who had a known history in a terrorist organization.

- Daniel Kenneally died on Jan 17, 1991.

- Shaun was eventually given the security clearance because Daniel was no longer alive, but he had moved on to a special forces Marine unit in the Mediterranean.

Unfortunately, since I wasn’t even 10 years old when my great-grandfather died, and since my family didn’t get a chance to see him that often anyway, I don’t remember him very well. Though apparently he pretty much refused to talk about all this and no one in the family knew much about it until Shaun found out from the Secret Service that his security clearance had been turned down. Then he came home asking questions about it.

I’d love to know more about what exactly he did in the IRA, I think all of this is very interesting, but that’s likely lost to history. I am going to try to find out more though.