I gave the Cribbed Content feature a rest for awhile because, admittedly, I wasn’t really keeping up with much around me.  I’ve put myself into a little corner of existence and did what I had to do.  I’ve got to say, on a personal note, that being continually employed for the last five years and then having a lull in work for three weeks waiting for some things to fall into place has been a bit difficult to handle.  I’m back on track now, back to keeping tabs on what’s going on around me, back to our weekly Affiliate Marketing Fanatics podcast on GeekCast.fm, and ready to kick some serious booty!  I’ve seen some cool stuff that I’m compelled to share!

• Link Cloaking, What is it? – Scott Jangro addresses the ways you can cloak affiliate links.  Also see where I discussed PHP redirects.
• The only coding I really know well is HTML, and I was passed this great article on 10 Rare HTML Tags You Really Should Know through StumbleUpon.  I’m definitely going to be putting some of these into immediate use!
• Did you see the ShareASale Photo Booth at Affiliate Summit West 2009?  I don’t think I did… but that’s okay, because they’re sharing the photos online and I don’t need more goofy photos of myself on the net.  Go check them out and rate them!  And if you’re disappointed you missed it, don’t worry… they plan on bringing it back for Affiliate Summit East this summer in New York!
• A new conference for affiliates, Affiliate Convention, is taking place next month.  I won’t be able to attend, but PMG will be represented as Heather Paulson will be speaking about super affiliate marketing techniques.
• There’s been a lot of rallying together lately with the tax nexus issues in several states affecting affiliate marketers.  Ed Byerly from one fledgling organization Affilaite Trust posted his thoughts on the surge of affiliate organizations attempting to unify a rather rag-tag group of people who make up this industry.
• For those email marketers out there, don’t worry I haven’t turned my back on you!  Check out this cool free tool to make sure your reverse DNS is set up right!

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The troops are mobilizing and the fight against CA AB 178 is on it’s way.  I’ll be doing my part next week, going up to the Capitol in Sacramento to help put a face to the problem for our legislators.  This week has just flown by.  I can’t believe all the news that’s gone on!

• Last summer I wrote an article about PHP affiliate link masking.  This week I was turned on to a more concise way using a jump script.
• Brian Littleton of ShareASale wrote a great post on how you can help re: the #advertisingtax facing California and several other states.
• Jamie Birch said it best on why you should hire an outsourced program manager.  So follow his advice and hire me and  New Edge Media
• Marketing Pilgrim announced a free webinar on the 31st about social selling and sales in web 2.0.  I won’t be able to attend (sad for me) but it’s free so you can totally sit in.
• Speaking of webinars, Commission Junction is webinar happy and just finished up a webinar on coupons yesterday.  Evan Weber posted a recap at CostPerNews. They’re hosting another webinar on brand hijacking on April 14th.
• Salesforce.com integrated Twitter results into their data.  Very cool.
• Join the Facebook group to help advocate against tax laws affecting your state.

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If you’re like me and have jumped into affiliate marketing head on, you may not know some of the nuances of using affiliate links. Recently, James Seligman of JMCA Media schooled me on how to really easily set up PHP redirects for your affiliate links to make them a bit more user friendly. Let me share this knowledge with you!

• Open up Notepad or a similar text editing program.
• Add the following code:
  <?
  header(”location:affiliate-link-goes-here“);
  ?>
• Replace the portion in italics above with the tracked link from the program of your choice.
• Save the file as a .php file with whatever name is easiest for you.
• Upload it to a designated diretory or folder on your website. Some possible names for the folder are recommends, deals, however you can call it whatever is easiest for you.
• When you want to add an affiliate link, just add the code <a href=”/recommends/affiliate.php”>Affiliate </a>

It’s that simple! I had head of PHP redirects before but, not knowing PHP very well myself, I never looked into how to do it. Luckily James was there to show me just how easy it is!  And now you have a weekend project to go mask all your affiliate links!

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