Online Opportunity

Well, I went to log onto swypefile this morning, and found this message:

Unfortunately, swypefile has been shut down for the time being. Things weren’t going as planned, and we are re-thinking the swypefile concept. Thanks to everyone who supported what we were trying to do!

This was without an email to members telling them anything would be happening, or any community discussion about why things weren’t going as planned. And the last email we’d received from them has said they were willing to go in whatever direction the community wanted, so what was the “plan” anyway?

This is a great example of how to alienate your members. If you start a community site, you must expect that site to be community driven, and be willing to go where the community wants it to go.

There are business realities on a site like this, of course. You must make enough money to cover your investment, your hosting costs, and your time involved in administering the site.

The only decent reason for arbitrarily shutting a site down without any community discussion is that it’s leaking money like a sieve, and you need to stop it before you go broke. I find it hard to believe that swypefile was in that position.

It’s unfortunate, because of all the blog promotion ideas that have come and gone this year, swypefile was actually working. Sure, you made some Adsense revenue, too, but you weren’t going to get rich from that. The real payoff was from the traffic your blog received, and how targeted that traffic was.

In that respect, swypefile drove more traffic, and more targeted traffic, to this blog than any of the other similar sites.

Update: Now that the site has launched, to get the video you must fill out the form about halfway down the page to get it. It’s still free, they just don’t have it on the main page anymore.

Smart Business Formula is a new site that’s opening up November 27th.

The site’s hype is that you pay a one-time fee to get access to a process that builds online income using only freely available Internet resources. The tag line is, “We promise you’ll NEVER have to pay for another How-To-Make-Money product again!”

Since the site hasn’t launched yet, I can’t do a review of it. But the site’s founders, Thomas Choo and Winston Yap, have uploaded an introductory video covering some of the basics of selling online. The video is about 20 minutes, and is great for anyone who hasn’t made anything online yet.

The video covers finding a product, identifying a target audience, and getting the word out about the product to that audience. The focus in the video is getting sales in 24 hours.

There’s also a form you can fill out to get on their announcement list for more videos and, presumably, a notification when they’ve launched.

Click here for the video.

There are plenty of ways to spend money to do link cloaking, and there are tutorials that talk about ways to do it yourself. But I haven’t seen a good tutorial that actually takes you through, step by step, how to do link cloaking yourself if you aren’t already a programmer.

So I decided to write one.

The link cloaking described in this post will be of the “pretty” form, e.g. http://www.onlineopportunity.org/recommends/NextBestThing. If you’re writing it yourself, there’s no sense having an ugly URL when you can just as easily have a nice one.

Dot htaccess

The first step is to edit the .htaccess file on your web server.

This is a moderately dangerous thing to do. Screwing up your .htaccess file can take down your entire web site. Luckily, you have a guide who has done just that in the past, and will do his best to avoid having you do the same.

Nevertheless, step 1 is to download a copy of your .htaccess file to your computer now! That way you have an original copy of it to upload to your server if any of the changes we’ll make screws up your site.

The changes you make will depend on what your .htaccess file looks like now. If you have WordPress on the site, it probably looks like this:

# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

# END WordPress

Everything between the comments (the lines that start with #) are automatically generated by WordPress. Don’t touch those bits or remove the comments!

To add DIY link cloaking to a WordPress powered site, add the following line of code after the “# END WordPress” comment.

RewriteRule ^recommends/([^\./]+)$ cloak.php?req=$1 [L]

The word “recommends” can be changed to whatever word you want to use. If you want to use a different word depending on what product you’re linking to, copy the RewriteRule line multiple times. For example, these lines allow me to use both “recommends” and “endorses”.

RewriteRule ^recommends/([^\./]+)$ cloak.php?req=$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^endorses/([^\./]+)$ cloak.php?req=$1 [L]

If this does not work, if you get a File Not Found page showing up in your blog, try removing the ^ from just in front of the word, so you would have:

RewriteRule recommends/([^\./]+)$ cloak.php?req=$1 [L]
RewriteRule endorses/([^\./]+)$ cloak.php?req=$1 [L]

If you don’t have WordPress, you may also have to add these lines just before the RewriteRules:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

Don’t add those if they already exist in your .htaccess, but do add them if they’re missing.

So a non-Wordpress .htaccess file might look like this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

RewriteRule ^recommends/([^\./]+)$ cloak.php?req=$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^endorses/([^\./]+)$ cloak.php?req=$1 [L]

Basically, these rules tell the server that anytime a web surfer tries to go to /recommends/blah on your site, to instead call the cloak.php file and pass in an argument named req that has the value “blah”.

Writing cloak.php

The next step is to write the cloak.php program. Luckily, I’ve already done this for you, so you can copy and paste the following into a file named cloak.php and upload it to the main directory of your website (the same directory where your .htaccess file was).

This has been kept deliberately simple so non-programmers can work with it. Where the file has “blah” or “GreatNewOpp” put whatever you want at the end of your cloaked URL (generally the name of whatever program you’re promoting). Also, on the header line change the URL to the URL of where they should really go (generally an affiliate link of some sort).

If you want more than two cloaked links, copy and paste one of the if/header pairs and modify the text and the URL for the new cloaked link. Upload the new file to your server and you’re ready to go.

What This Doesn’t Do

This does nothing for ad tracking, which requires more complex code. You can slot in ad tracking easily enough, though, by forwarding the cloaked link to an ad tracking link, and then the ad tracking link forwards to your final affiliate URL.

So there you have it. Simple link cloaking with pretty URLs.

If you have any trouble getting this working, post in the comments. Also, I’ve tested this on a couple 2.2 versions of WordPress, and not at all on 2.3 or anything earlier. Have that backup of .htaccess handy!

Just a quick update about swypefile.

Since Sunday, my total earnings have been around $5. That might not sound like much, but I’m very pleased, since I’ve basically been paid to promote my best blog posts. Online Opportunity has gotten a good amount of traffic from swypefile, and on the whole those visitors are willing to click through links in the posts to check out what I’ve posted about. This is highly targeted traffic.

If you’re not having much success with the site, remember that your audience is other Internet Marketers. Post an article that’s just trying to get referrals to your latest opportunity, and nobody will pay any attention to it. Post an article that genuinely tries to provide value to other Internet Marketers, and you’ll see some results.

For a site that’s just launched, swypefile is off to a great start.