Kontera Payment

A little while ago I had an email in my account from a service I had forgotten about for a long time. It was Kontera, my in-text advertising program I had signed up with in January 2009. They were letting me know that they had paid me $107.29 in USD for the advertising on my sites http://www.mybeachdecor.com and http://www.healthydietweightloss.com. WOW! Happy Day!

Then I looked back to see for what time frame this payment really was. Yep, you guessed it, it was for the time from when I signed up (January 2009) to July 2010. That makes it 1 1/2 years, or 18 months. Spread the payment out over 18 months and it means I earned not quite $6 per month with Kontera. Whoopidoo!

Well, to be honest, whilst it seems very disappointing on first glance, it is still money I earned for doing absolutely nothing extra, just by installing Kontera In-Text Advertising on my blog. So as “bad” as the payout seems, I think it’s worth adding some In-Text Advertising to monetize your blog.

What exactly is in-text advertising? Well, have you ever seen a website where some of the words are underlined, or maybe dotted, highlighted in blue, and when you hover over them you get a little window pop up with some related information? (Have a look at my site about Lighthouse Home Decor you can see it there).

What you will have to consider is whether the extra advertising on your blog will actually turn people off. If you have a very loyal readers base or customer base, it might actually annoy them if there are too many links that point them away from your site.

There are quite a few different companies out there that offer this service. Opinions on these services differ quite a lot. Some Affiliate Marketers don’t seem to like Kontera, but swear by InfoLinks, – they seem to be paying out at a better rate. There are some others, but I have not investigated them yet.

What I have decided to do is to stop Kontera for now and sign up with Infolinks. I want to see for myself whether there is a big difference in the payout and service. I remember, what I don’t like about Kontera is that you can never look back more than 6 months for your earnings. Which makes it a bit difficult if it takes you more than 6 months to earn up to your payout threshold. So after about 6 months, whenever I wanted to know the total earned in my account, I had to email Kontera and request a figure. Which was a real pain in the butt.

Both companies have a payment threshold of $50 and pay straight into your paypal account.

So, if you are thinking of monetizing your blog or site, have a think about In-Text Advertising.

I would like to know also whether any of you have experience with this, and how your success rate is/was. Which company do you prefer? Do you know of others that might be better? Let me know!

Naturally curious, I had to check out the site, of course! And I am a bit of a sucker for plugins, especially free ones…

After downloading and activating the plugin (you will get video instructions on how to do this, if you should not know), I have to say that I am really impressed with the features! I think Mark Dulisse has done a great job with this plugin. It will make your SEO so much easier. I especially like the list of suggested plugins (for SEO purposes) you get within your wp-admin after installing the plugin (told you, – I’m a plugin-sucker!). I was very surprised that out of a list of 13 suggested plugins for SEO improvement I had only 2 installed!!!

I am not going into what this plugin will do for you – you can read all about it on the SEO Power website -, but I will attach a few screenshots from within my blog so  you can see what it will look like.

My suggestion is for you to get the plugin – you will not regret it. I can’t tell you any results yet – I had it only installed for a day so far, I need to give it a little bit of time – but I have no doubt that it will work.

This is just a little gem I couldn’t let pass you by! BTW – if you click on the screenshots, you will be able to have a better look at them.

SEO Power Dashboard

SEO Power Dashboard

SEO Power Keywords

If you have a blog and are trying to maintain it, you will most likely be struggling with creating fresh content on a regular basis. That is at least my big downfall, I just lack the time to research and put together new and interesting posts in the field of Internet Marketing regularly. But we are all being told how important it is to continuously update our blogs or sites and add fresh and unique content, as this is what can push us up in Google rankings. And that’s the ultimate goal, right? To reach one of the front pages of Google.

So we do our best and try to come up with interesting or new stuff, but to be honest, I think anything we can possibly write about has already been told many times over by others, and will rarely be a real revelation. And we do want to provide good content, don’t we!?

Anyway, so at the beginning of this blog I tried to post every few days, and that turned into once a week or so, and now I am nearly down to once a month…. BUT – the funny thing is that my PR has gone up from a 2 to a 3, and I am still getting as many, if not more, visitors to my blog every day as before. What’s been happening?

It’s actually quite simple, and also quite brilliant, and I honestly have only just realized it. My blog has been updating itself.

How? – Through my commentators leaving new comments, that is! See, not just post you make count as fresh content, but also the comments you get on your posts. Any posts. SO, the more comments you get, the more often your blog receives fresh content. I can’t believe I did not realize that before…. Hooray! The pressure to generate new posts has been released.

Now, there is still nothing better to get good Google rankings and to become a well known and liked blog than updating it often – with your own posts. I am just saying that you don’t have to feel so bad if you don’t get around to it all the time, as long as you get some comments you have a bit longer to make your next post.

Just one more word: to utilize your commentators input properly, you should have the following plugins installed on your blog, simply to give something back to your fellow bloggers who are helping you out on the content side:

DoFollow | CommentLuv | KeywordLuv | Top Commentator

You can read up on CommentLuv, KeywordLuv and DoFollow here.

If you are running a WordPress blog, you can find and install all these plugins in your Plugins section by searching for them, except KeywordLuv. KeywordLuv you will have to go to their site and install it manually. I believe that all these plugins are some of the most important plugins you should have installed as a blogger from a SEO and Internet Marketing point of view.

So, let your readers update your blog with fresh content!

Never mind, I still want you to have this post, I might just try and leave out the screen shots I did – you will still be able to follow, trust me. So here it goes:

Have you ever wondered how to create a flash looking banner or button to advertise your website? I certainly did, and a little while ago I actually found out, from one of my fellow webmasters Maya, who runs a very successful blog for beach lovers called Completely Coastal. I came across her blog searching for possible sites for a link exchange to my beach site. And there it was, in her sidebar on the right hand side – a great button to advertise your site, even with a copy-and-paste html code for anybody to grab it and display it on their site! Of course I needed to know how she did it. And Maya was so nice to explain it to me.

One thing I changed in her instructions, though – she said she created the button with Paint.net, and I tried that, but I have to say I found the program too complicated for me, I just couldn’t work it out. (Blonde? )

The software I have been using to create my banner is called XHeader, and it is probably one of the best free website tools I have downloaded so far. It is absolutely free and so easy to use, it’s not funny.   In fact, all the header graphics for this site and for my site Healthy Diet Weight Loss have been created with XHeader. It really comes in handy for all sorts of graphics for your site.

So after Maya explained to me how to create a banner or button for my sites to advertise them, I played around with XHeader for a while to create a nice 125×125 graphic. If you have a look at my website Lighthouse Home Decor

(note: this is my Beach Decor website, and I am starting to build backlinks to some of the inner pages of it now to get the pages ranked in the search engines, too, not just the home page, that’s why I use another one of my keyword phrases “Lighthouse Home Decor”; this will over time give me more visitors to the site through my other keywords, too),

you will notice the new “button to grab” on the left hand sidebar towards the bottom. This is exactly what Maya has on her site, too, and that’s what I want to show you. You can create all sorts of sizes of banners or logos with XHeader.

When you create a button or banner for your site, I believe it is important that you keep it in line with the theme of your site, like colors, pictures, etc. What I have done for my Lighthouse Home Decor site is just grab a piece of the site graphics and incorporated it into the button (you find the crab and the thong at the bottom of the site )

So, here is what you do:

1. Download your free software XHeader and install it on your computer.
2. Have a good play with the software – you can’t do anything wrong! Here is what I usually do:

• Click on “new”

• Click “Create a blank header”

• Enter the size of your graphic. Now, the square little button is 125 x 125 pixels. But you could really make it any size you want.

And then just start having a go at creating a nice button! I usually start by importing an image, then adding text and transparency etc.

Once  you have created your masterpiece, just save it as .jpg in a location of your choice. (I always go for “superb” size).

Once you have done that, you need to upload the image to your website. I have a self-hosted WordPress blog, so I uploaded it (from the folder I had saved it to) via my free FTP program FileZilla to my website (wp-admin/images/YourImageTitle.jpg). You need to do that because you will need an URL for the image.

TIP: If you do not know much about file transfers via FTP, there is another solution: Photobucket, a free image hosting site. Just become a member of photobucket, and you can upload any number of pictures or graphics from your computer to your account in photobucket, and each of the photos will then have an URL for you to use.

So, once your image is uploaded to your website (or Photobucket) and you know the URL, here is the magic:

To display the button on your site, including the Text window with html code for other people to “grab it”, you need to use this code:

<img alt=”Your keywords for your site” src=”the URL of your Image“/><br>
<textarea style=”width: 125px; height: 125px” name=”textfield”><a href=”The URL of your Website” target=”_blank” title=”The Title of your website“><img border=”0″ src=”the URL of your Image“/></a></textarea>

The red colored text is what you will have to fill in with your details. Voila!!! Isn’t that cool??? I thought so.

…I am going to upload my new button for this site straight after doing this post, so check out my sidebar and let me know what you think!! And if you like, you can also grab my new button and put it on your site…

Thanks, Maya, for your very much appreciated help!

I would love to hear back from all of you who try this out, to see how you go. And of course, if you create a banner or button for your website or blog like I have done with this method, let me and my readers know and leave us a link to your site so we can check it out!

My online blogger friend from the blog hospitalera.com has joined a contest, and because I believe that she is a nice person and bloggers should help each other, I am posting a link for her right here.

Oes tsetnoc

Now, you might be wondering what this is about, and why I am doing this. Instead of me explaining it to you, why don’t you head over to her blog and have a quick read, – who knows, you might be a nice blogger too and lend her a helping hand…?

Many Comments

I have to say since my PR increased to 3 the amount of comments I get here on the blog has gone up quite a bit. So clearly my commentators want to take advantage of my DoFollow, CommentLuv, KeywordLuv and Top Commentator “offerings”! Which is great, that’s exactly what they are here for.

The only down side – for me – at this point is that I cannot keep up with replying to some of the comments. Not all require me to answer or reply to them, but there are always quite a few that I would like to reply to. But because of the sheer amount of comments and because I still do have a life apart from blogging (yes, I do!!! ), this has become a very time consuming and nearly impossible task.

I want to let you all know that even if I don’t reply to your comments, please don’t take it personally, I do read them and I do still hand approve all of them, I just cannot put all my time into responding any more. I will if there is anything really pressing, or I think I really need to answer or reply to a comment, but other than that I hope you will understand if your comment might not get a reply.

I have also looked into threaded (or “nested”) comments – this is when my reply to any comment appears straight after the comment and you do not have to scroll down any more to find the reply (have a look how it works on my Healthy Diet Weight Loss blog) -, but for some reason, even though I have the option ticked in my discussion settings, it does not change on my blog. I have to try and figure out why that is. Because some of my posts are getting so many comments, and it gets quite confusing to find the comments and replies that belong together.

Anyway, enough rambling.

If you are an avid blogger and you encourage your readers to interact with you on your blog, be prepared that keeping up with replying to the comments might take more and more time out of  your day. I love the interest all of you show in my blog posts, but please be understanding that I cannot reply all the time any more. Deal?

Well, there have been hot discussions about whether by having these Plugins on your site you are actually “draining” your own site of “link juice”, because every link from commentators going out might take away a little bit of authority (link juice) from you, and therefore hurt your PageRank in Google. Nobody seems to be really sure whether these plugins do actually hurt your own site or not. That’s why so many bloggers are very hesitant about installing them. Also, there is the issue about possible spam comments – people are scared that these plugins might invite the spammers to leave tons of inappropriate comments for you to deal with.

Guess what – a couple of days ago my mind was put to rest about the whole issue. Because, to be honest, I wasn’t quite so sure myself whether these plugins were good for my blog or not. Want to know what I discovered?

For the last 6+ months my blog has been a PR2. A few days ago Google did an update of PR’s, and my site went up to a PR3! I think that speaks for itself. I have had so many comments over the last few months, and all of them are DoFollow and have links pointing back to the commentators site, and what happened? My blog went UP in PageRank!

This has proven to me that by having these plugins installed and by actively encouraging others to interact with me on my blog I have added value to it, and somebody else seems to be thinking the same . As for the spam comments – yes, I do get more than before, but I have Akismet installed and it’s been protecting me pretty well. Also, I still do approve all comments myself, so there is no problem there.

So, to me it is clear – if you give, you surely shall receive! Now I hope that this post will inspire some of you to do the same…

Get Website Traffic

Today I want to talk about how to get website traffic.

You see, I am still going with Alex Jeffreys Coaching Program, even though I haven’t really had a lot of time, I keep slowly working away at it. And I have just discovered that Alex has put up a contest for all fellow students to see who can drive the most traffic to their website within the 2 week period from 1st August to 14th August 2009. Now, obviously I am starting more than half way through the competition because I have not been up to date with his teachings, and I certainly won’t win the contest, but I still think getting more traffic to your website is always a bonus!

So, as a little twist in Alex’s competition, we are supposed to talk about how we are driving traffic to our websites, too. Petra-Weiss.com is an established blog (up for about 11 months), so I have been getting constant traffic already. But how did I do it? And how am I going to get more traffic in the future?

Here is a screenshot of my current Google Analytics account; I have only installed it a couple of weeks ago, also as a “homework” we had to do in Alex’s Coaching program. (Google Analytics is an excellent way of analyzing where your traffic is coming from, how many pages visitors look at, how much time they spend on your site, and what sort of actions they perform. I didn’t know it was that good, but you can really improve your sites performance when working with these figures).

Google Analytics Shot Petra-Weiss.com

Now, over the past 2 weeks and a bit I had 574 visits and 1017 pageviews. I also had a 66.55% bounce rate, which represents the percentage of initial visitors to my site who “bounce” away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within my site. So you can guess that I am not too happy about that!

But how do I get website traffic to my site, and how am I going to improve it?

• I have been commenting on other blogs occasionally. This can definitely be improved! When I picked the blogs I commented on, I was mostly looking for top commentator blogs, as you can gain great backlinks to your blog when you make it to the top commentator list. Also important for me was that the blogs are “do-follow” so the link actually counts in search engine ranking terms. So part of my strategy with commenting was SEO. But one should not forget that in traffic terms, any comment on another blog (ideally related to your niche) has the potential to drive traffic, as other people see the link and might decide to click on it, whether it is do-follow or not! So I will be putting myself out there more and not worry too much about only commenting on do-follow blogs.

• I have been trying to optimize my posts for the search engines by picking keywords that have high search volume and low competition. It has actually worked – over half of the traffic to my site comes from the search engines! I am doing it again with this post; I looked for long-tail keywords in regard to driving traffic to a website, and I found “get website traffic” with Google’s keyword tool – it gets searched for 14,800 times a month, and when entered into Google Search within brackets it has only 70,700 competing sites! That is fantastic! So I am trying to optimize this post for the search term “get website traffic” to hopefully get some traffic to my site through the search engines! Have a look at my Google Analytics account regarding sources of traffic to my site:
  

  Google Analytics - Traffic Sources Petra-Weiss.com

I actually hit the Jackpot with my “Free Affiliate Insider” scam posts – I landed on page one quickly and everybody who wants to know something about the program “Free Affiliate Insider” lands on my blog! Search Engine Traffic is the best traffic you can get; if you make it to page one for certain search terms, you get free and often quite considerable traffic to your website.

• I have been building backlinks to my site, also to improve my search engine rankings and get more traffic. I signed up with Angelas BackLinkBuilder Program through the Warrior Forum, for only $5 a month she is supplying you with 30 high page rank backlinks per month which you can use to link back to your site(s). This offer was too good to pass up! Now, whilst this might not be giving me much traffic in the short term, it will pay off in the longer term as my site search engine ranking will improve and I will therefore gain more free traffic from the search engines. Voila!

• I have been active in different IM Forums and have my sites links in my signature. So for every post I make, there is another link to my site(s) for people to click on. But truth to be told, I have been to busy to do much in forums lately, also something I have to improve on immensly!

• Yedda and Yahoo Answers. Yedda and Yahoo answers have acutally given me a fair amount of traffic from the answers I left there alone. If you go and answer questions on either of those sites, and you leave a link to your site, people are quite likely to “check out what you have to say” when they like your answer.

• Twitter, Facebook – hmmm, this is absolutely to be improved on! Shame on me, for ages I haven’t even been following my followers on twitter, which is a shame! I need to get more active in Social Networks and get the word out.

• Writing Articles, Squidoo Lenses – as much as I know that this will get you more traffic, I simply didn’t have the time to get too much into that lately. Something to think about regarding outsourcing. It could well be worth spending the money for somebody to write me some articles. If you optimize your articles with good keywords, they can bring in a fair amount of traffic.

This is mainly what I have been doing to get website traffic to petra-weiss.com. What have I planned to do in the short term to really try to spike my traffic for the contest?

1. Twitter – I will tweet a lot more, maybe re-tweet some of my greater posts , not only tweet when I make an update to my blog which is about once every two weeks…
2. Comment, comment, comment. I will comment on many of the other students blogs (some of whom you will find here to the right in my sidebar; absolutely great people there!), on other IM blogs and just try to add more value to the community!
3. Keep going with answering questions at Yedda and Yahoo answers. Both invaluable traffic sources for me!
4. Forums – be more active in forums.

Puh, I am sure that’s not all, but that’s about it for me tonight, it’s nearly 11 pm and I have to be up for my accounting and bookkeeping studies tomorrow morning, so if I find more things I can add to this list I will do so – later. Might just do a few tweets before shut-eye, though….

To Blog Or Not To Blog...

With this post I want to give you my honest opinion about Niche Blogging and “Make Money With Blog” – and at the same time do a little experiment to show you how to optimize blog posts for the search engines – because this is a big factor if you want to be successful with niche blogging. It can determine how visible your site will be across the web and as a result how much traffic you will have and how many sales you will make!

You noticed that my first sentence has “make money with blog” in it and it doesn’t really read very well. Because of that it might not be the best example but it is the long tail keyword I have chosen for this post so I want to optimize this post for it. After doing my keyword marketing research (–> please notice this is a bit of internal linking within my blog, good for SEO ) by checking in Google Adwords I found that the keyword phrase “make money with blog” gets nearly 3000 searches every month, which is good, and when entering the keyword phrase into Google Search within quotation marks like this: “make money with blog”, I found that it has only  22,200 competing sites for the exact phrase, which is fantastic!

So what I do is have the keyword in my title, and 2 to 3 times or so throughout the body of my post, once somewhere at the beginning, once towards the end, and once or twice in the middle. I have emphasized the keyword phrase by either making it bold, or hyper-linking it to another one of my posts (which will give that post another little seo boost!), or underlining. That way, the search engines can see that the phrase is important in my post. We will see what happens over time in the search engine placements, shall we?

Ok, niche blogging, here we go:

There is so much information and so many offers going around about setting up niche blogs and earning an income with them, you would think that it is one of the best ways of earning money online. Is that true?

Not A Walk In The Park!

I am not going to beat around the bush here: Setting up a blog in a certain niche can be very lucrative if it is done right. But it also requires a lot of hard work and dedication. It is certainly not a “walk in the park” as some Internet Marketers might make you believe.

Apart from having to do all your preliminary research for a profitable niche market to get into (which you should like a little, too, because there is nothing worse than to have to write about something you are not interested in!), you will also have to post to your blog on a regular basis. Best practice is probably to post every 3 – 4 days. Now I personally find that extremely hard, because I do not believe in just regurgitating other peoples articles or blog posts (and you shouldn’t, either, – remember: unique content is king in Google’s eyes!). I think when posting you should always make sure you deliver interesting and unique information, and be yourself. And if you struggle with writing (like me), it can be quite daunting, and easy to put off for another day. – This is one of the reasons why my blogs aren’t getting updated that regularly but when I do update them, I hope I bring something useful to my readers….you!

What you should also do if you want your blog to be successful and make money with blog ( )  is to optimize each blog post for a keyword phrase relevant to your niche.  That way, you are much more likely to have your single blog posts showing up in the Search Engine Result Pages and getting more traffic.

There are really a lot of factors to take into consideration when setting up niche blogs to make money, and it can be quite hard when you just start out to get it right, and it is easy to get discouraged. Especially when you have been expecting for it to be quick and easy, and you discover that it actually takes work, time and effort to be successful. If you need help, go and grab a copy of my book Affiliate Marketing S.O.S. where I go into great step-by-step detail about setting up a niche blog.

But niche blogging can also be one of the most rewarding ways to make money online, because of the interaction with your readers and the creativity that goes into a blog. It is easy to get addicted! And really, the more you give, the more you will get back, monetary and otherwise.

To sum it up I have to say that when I started out with niche blogging I was surprised at what was really required to make it work – I guess I had thought it would be easier. At the same time it took me by surprise how much I enjoyed doing it, and when I started to see the returns, I was hooked.

Fazit: Niche blogging is definitely one of the best ways to make money online - if you are prepared to put in the hard work and have the patience to wait the time it takes before you can see the results. But then you will be thrilled, I know it! Niche blogging is one of the big future money makers for Internet marketers, and if you are even slightly  interested in making money online you should definitely give it a go – make money with blog!

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…

This is a post that has been inspired by my fellow internet marketer friend Gary Packer (Hi Gary!), who has helped me out a couple of times already when I was faced with a technical challenge on the way. He also helped me with the task of hiding my affiliate links in my ebook (which is just about finished!!! ). What he has shown me works fantastic to hide any affiliate link anywhere – but you need to have your own self hosted blog or website to do it. Thanks for all your help, Gary!

Like many of us, I was faced with the problem of ugly looking affiliate links that everybody could see through straight away, and as you probably know, plain old ugly affiliate links will not be as successful in converting into dollars as the one’s that are more cleverly disguised.

The question was: How could I hide affiliate links so that they still redirected to my affiliate product, but looked a lot more appealing?

What I have used for most of the time over the past year is a free service called TiniURL to hide affiliate links when doing blog posts, or email promotions, or commenting on other blogs, or in forums, social networking sites…. TinyURL is actually quite a good service, the problem is though that it still doesn’t look very pretty, and people know over time that the “tiniurl” is hiding an affiliate link. Especially in the Internet Marketing niche!

So I was keen to find another way of hiding my affiliate links. And that’s what I found when I came across Gary Packer’s Blog! I noticed that his links looked rather like they were part of his blog – very clever! He had created a “Recommends” folder and within that just recommended the products he thought worth promoting. The affiliate links end up looking like this: http://www.petra-weiss.com/recommends/johnthornhillmasterclass.php

Pretty good, I thought! So I had to ask him how he did it (because I am still a learner regarding all this “stuff”). And here it is:

1. First you have to create a “Recommends” folder for you blog or website on your computer. Like this:
2. Within that “Recommends” folder, you need to open up a notepad and copy this code into it I called my notepad “Code for Recommends”. Once you have done that, you are all set!
3. Every time you want to promote an affiliate link now, the first thing you have to do is put the affiliate URL in where it says “youraffiliatelinkhere.com” (it is usually a www. address). Like this (I had to block out the nitty gritty of my affiliate link…):
4. Then you have to save this code as a php file. To do this, click on “File” – “Save As…” and you will see the window below pop up. You now need to name the File what you want to name it – so if I want to promote Wealthy Affiliate, I name it “WealthyAffiliate.php”. Please be aware that upper and lower case DO matter, so if you want to use the link later on your site or anywhere else to promote, you need to make sure to display it exactly like you named it, including upper and lower case. It is also extremely important to name the file “.php” at the end, otherwise this whole thing won’t work. It is also important to save it as “All Files”, or if you have the option in your dropdown menu as “php file/document” or something (I only had “Text Documents” or “All Files” to choose from). It won’t work otherwise.
5. Next you will have to head over to your FTP Program and connect to your webspace (that’s why I said you have to have a self-hosted blog or website). I have to assume that you have done this before and hopefully know your way around in there a little What you have to do is create a “Recommends” folder in your public_html folder for your blog/site. Now, I am with FileZilla, so what I explain here is done within FileZilla. You might have a different File Transfer Program (FTP), but they all work very similar once in. – So when you have logged into your webspace, click on “public_html”. Then right click on the empty folder to create a “new directory”. Name that new directory “recommends”, then click on “OK”. Just like I do here:Yeah, you have got a recommends folder!
6. All that’s left to do now is to upload your previously created php-file to your new “recommends” folder in your webspace. As you are in the FTP program already, this is easy. Find the “Recommends” folder on your computer (within FileZilla, your computer files will be on the left and your webspace on the right. Some FTP programs have it the other way around). Once you have located it, click on it until you find the php-file you created earlier. Mine is the “WealthyAffiliate.php” file. So I left click on my “WealthyAffiliate.php” file and then drag it to the “recommends” folder in my webspace and drop it in there! DONE!
7. So go ahead and test it! Your new hidden affiliate link should read like this (just on your blog’s URL, of course!): http://www.petra-weiss.com/recommends/WealthyAffiliate.php

I hope you have had success with it! Once you have done it a few times, it will be a lot easier. It sounds very complicated, but is not really so. It’s just something that is quite hard to put down on paper (like so many things having to do with the technical side of websites!!!)

And the good thing is, you will not have to create a “recommends” folder in your webspace every single time, that is something that gets done only the first time you set it up. Then it’s there, and all you have to do is create your php file and upload it to the existing “recommends” folder on your webspace.

There you have it – how to hide affiliate links like the pros!