Here’s an interesting way to earn online cash that I’ve been experimenting with recently that uses Clickbank and PHP redirects. It’s still a bit too early to say exactly how well this works but the results so far look promising. Here’s a quick overview of how this method works.

If you’re like me you may have a number of unused domains sitting around and not earning you any money. You don’t have time to develop them fully by building a niche blog, setting up BANS or other scripted site and then doing a full blown link building campaign. Maybe you bought the domain based on a keyword and then realized that the keyword wasn’t right for some reason, such it having too much competition or too little buying traffic, or maybe it was just too generic. It could be a personal name domain that you aren’t ready to use in a supporting role yet. Even if you don’t have a spare domain this technique will also work with subdomains. Now, let’s get started.

I assume that you already have a Clickbank affiliate account setup. If not, go do so. Now, you’ll want to select products that are selling well so look for the top products, typically indicated by gravity, but you may want to avoid the very hottest sellers since competition will be higher. Find a product that you feel that you can promote easily. This could be an Internet Marketing product, a financial product or even a hobby product. Get your hoplink code for that product. It will in a format like this:

http://yourclickbankid.thepublisherclickbankid.hop.clickbank.net

Now that you have your affiliate link we’re ready to do some PHP coding. Stop that groaning, it’s nothing all that hard to do. Just open Notepad or another text editor and type in the following code:

<?php
sleep(5);//seconds to wait..
header(“Location:http://yourclickbankid.thepublisherclickbankid.hop.clickbank.net”);
?>

Of course, you’ll replace the link with your hoplink. Don’t forget to do that!

The idea of the code is to wait 5 seconds and then redirect to the sales page for the Clickbank product you’ve selected. While the delay isn’t absolutely necessary, having a brief delay rather than an immediate redirect can be effective in preventing ‘bots from detecting the redirect as easily. Methods that use meta refresh, javascript or htaaccess are said to be detected easier. I’m not sure if this is the case or not but I went with this PHP method. There are more sophisticated, gray/black hat, scripts available that offer more features but these don’t come cheap.

Now save the file as index.php and upload it to the root folder of your domain using FTP or the File Manager in CPanel. Next, test out your link and PHP code by typing in the domain name in your browser. If all is setup correctly then you’ll be taken, after the delay, to the Clickbank merchant’s sales page.

Now you’re ready to do a little marketing. Basically this is done by placing a link to your site in a number of places where you have a good chance of getting referral traffic.

This technique used to be a popular way to spam Craigslist and some people still use variations of it there. However, from what I understand, this is a bit of a cat-and-mouse game as the Craigslist staff battles the spammers. I’d recommend staying out of that fray and look for easier targets.

Another way is to comment on popular blogs using the link to your redirected domain. The risk here is that you may get Akismet’ed if the blogger in question decides to check out your site and finds the redirect. It’s best to find a blog where the checking is lax. I’ve found a few very popular blogs where this is the case. As with commenting for followed links, make sure that your comment is a quality one that won’t raise eyebrows.

Forum signatures are another option but, once again, heavy moderation and/or poor quality posts can draw a ban.

You may also find popular news sites and the like where you can leave a link in a comment. Of course, these are almost always nofollow links that are useless for link building but are effective for our purposes here.

Another technique is to simply leave the link in text on sites that don’t allow links. For example, lets say you’re leaving a comment on the recession on a news site that allows comments but no links. It might go something like this:

The market is really bad today, the worst that I’ve seen in my lifetime, that’s for sure. I’ve found that investing in XYZ to be a good hedge against some of the recessionary pressures in the marketplace today. Using some techniques I learned at www.myredirecteddomain.com really helped me protect my portfolio from a certain debacle.

The goal here is to get some type-in traffic from people cutting and pasting the link into their browser.

Some people use article submissions with the redirected domain in the resource box. Of course, direct traffic from articles isn’t all that great in my experience but others have reported significant sales this way.

Adding your redirected domain to blogrolls, comments or even in articles on your active sites is low risk method. You can also create Squidoo lenses and other simple one pagers to funnel traffic toward your redirected domain. This is a little bit more labor intensive but is a little less so than a full blown link building campaign.

Remember that you probably won’t be seeing a lot of traffic from this technique. The income from it is unlikely to come close to what you’ll earn from a fully developed and properly SEO’d site. But, it beats having a domain sitting around earning nothing at all and often one sale of a Clickbank product in a month will make the “$1 a Day” average you want for your sites. It only takes a few minutes to setup and then spreading a few links around to start earning cash online this way.

What are your thoughts on this technique?

Frank Carr December 4th, 2008 Advertising Methods

Advertising Methods
affiliate link cloaking, clickbank, Craigslist, domains, redirection