How To: Hiding Your Affiliate Links using WordPress

With the increasing popularity of using affiliate links to generate income online, it can significantly improve your conversion rate on affiliate sign-ups by disguising your affiliate links using a URL with your domain name, then redirecting them to the appropriate affiliate.

The idea behind using this theory is that readers will click on it thinking it is an internal link on your site, rather than taking you to a third party site. Another benefit is that all of your blog’s links point toward an internal address on your domain, giving you control to update the URL easily. This helps avoid dead links whenever a company changes a URL and makes it easy to update your affiliate links when the need arises.

Redirects can be accomplished in a variety of ways, but as this blog focuses on self-hosted WordPress, I will be going over an easy way to do this using a PHP redirect. Here are the steps I took when I hid my affiliate links for this website:

1. Create a folder called “Go.”
2. Create a .php document (this can easily be done with Notepad or any similar program) and name it after the appropriate affiliate link you are using.
3. Now paste the following code into the document: <? header("Location: http://youraffiliatelinkurlhere"); ?>
4. Save it into the “Go” folder created above.
5. Repeat steps 2-4 until you’ve created a .php file for each affiliate link.
6. Go to your FTP and upload your “Go” folder directly to the public_html folder.
7. Update all your affiliate links to point towards your new redirect!

Your redirect will look something like http://www.yourdomainname.com/go/phpdocumentname.php.

You can name the documents whatever you want, or you can use a different name than “Go” for your folder name. The important thing is that you remember what you named it so that you can use your new affiliate link!

Now you can use this Plugins to hide your affiliate link: Gocodes plugins

How To: Changing Your WordPress Admin Color

I know a lot of people that have upgraded to WordPress 2.5 have all flocked to the Fluency Admin plugin, but many people probably didn’t know that you can also change the color of your dashboard to a more “classic” WordPress look from within your dashboard. This was added for people that are slow to accept change.

All you need to do is go into your “Users” tab and select “Your Profile.” Once that is done, you should see the following:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here you can select the “Classic” radio button to change to a darker and more familiar blue color. This change is only saved for the individual user, so other users logged in will need to log in and make the change as well if they want the classic look.

Hopefully future versions will contain more options, but for now, it is at least nice to have a choice!

Tips For Protecting Your WordPress Installation

Matt Cutts is most commonly known for his job as the head of the Google Search team, but the guy also appears to know a lot about being a webmaster. A couple of days ago Matt wrote a post titled Three Tips to Protect Your WordPress Installation where he details three things you can do to help avoid having your WordPress blog get hacked.

Here is the first tip:

Secure your /wp-admin/ directory. What I’ve done is lock down /wp-admin/ so that only certain IP addresses can access that directory. I use an .htaccess file, which you can place directly at /wp-admin/.htaccess . This is what mine looks like:

AuthUserFile /dev/null
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName “Access Control”
AuthType Basic

order deny,allow
deny from all
# whitelist home IP address
allow from 64.233.169.99
# whitelist work IP address
allow from 69.147.114.210
allow from 199.239.136.200
# IP while in Kentucky; delete when back
allow from 128.163.2.27

I’ve changed the IP addresses, but otherwise that’s what I use. This file says that the IP address 64.233.169.99 (and the other IP addresses that I’ve whitelisted) are allowed to access /wp-admin/, but all other IP addresses are denied access. Has this saved me from being hacked before? Yes.

Click over to check out the other two!

WordPress Tip: Customizing Your 404 Page

Most themes typically come with a 404.php page that shows up by default whenever an invalid URL is visited on your blog. Depending on how often you change the URL of existing posts or delete old posts, it may or may not be a high traffic page for your blog.

Either way, when a typical web surfer finds your blog and is greeted with the lovely 404 page, they will most commonly just click the “Back” button on their browser and continue browsing through the other search results. If your 404 page is setup correctly, you can often retain that traffic by either offering something funny to grab the readers attention or by offering a variety of methods for them to find the post they are looking for. Over at Theme Playground I ran across a great post about customizing your 404 page, which includes a bunch of suggestions for retaining that traffic.

I personally prefer to provide useful resources on my 404 pages, so I will typically use something like the following code to help search engine traffic hopefully find what they are looking for:

<h1>Not Found, Error 404</h1>
<p>The page you are looking for no longer exists.</p>
<p>Perhaps you can find what you are looking for by searching the site archives!</p>
<b>Search by Page:</b>
<ul>
<?php wp_list_pages('title_li='); ?>
</ul>
<b>Search by Month:</b>
<ul>
<?php wp_get_archives('type=monthly'); ?>
</ul>
<b>Search by Category:</b>
<ul>
<?php wp_list_cats('sort_column=name'); ?>
</ul>

I will also sometimes call the search box (usually searchform.php) and the popular posts plugin as well to help retain that traffic, depending on the type of blog the 404 page is being built for. How do you have your 404 page setup?

WordPress Tip - Use the WordPress Post Slug

If you aren’t a person that is fairly concious of search engine optimization when blogging, you probably having given much thought to the Post Slug field in your WordPress write panel.

Creating a post slug basically allows you to create the post URL of your choice after your blog’s name, depending on the permalink structure that your blog uses. By default, the post slug will be the blog post’s title. For example, by default, this would post having the following URL:

http://blogtut.com/wordpress-tip-use-the-wordpress-post-slug

Unfortunately, this is not a very search engine friendly URL, as many of the keywords are at the end of the URL. By setting my own custom post slug, I am able to create a better URL for my post:

http://blogtut.com/wordpress-post-slug

In this case, my post title focuses on the keywords for this post, creating more emphasis on them. The great thing about this tip is it takes a very minimal amount of time to do and will become second nature once you’ve turned it into a habit.

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