Pretty Link

Pretty Link is the name of the plugin created by Blair Williams. Very quickly to install this from your dashboard, click on your “Plugins” tab, click “Add New,”  type in “Pretty Link” in your  search bar, click “Install” once you’ve found the one by Blair Williams, then activate. You’ll have a new tab at the bottom of your dashboard to use your new plugin.

Settings explained for affiliates

If you really want to you can set up different groups depending on which project you’re working on. Let’s say for example you promote online poker sites, poker software, and poker clickbank products. That’s three groups right there for the organized types. Simply click on “groups” then “Add a pretty link group” type in your information and hit create.

To create a new cloaked link click “Add Link” type in the url you want to cloak, give it a new pretty link (yoururl.com/name you want for your link… example yoururl.com/fulltilt) title it (from the example it would be full title poker) give it a description if you want then click on “Link Options.”

Under redirection types you have a few different options. If you want a truly cloaked link select cloaked. Change parameters to “Standard Parameter Forwarding” if you want to get credit for your sale and click create.

If you’re interested in simply tracking a page you can select “pixel.” This will create one of those 1 x 1 pixel images that many websites including paypal use to track pages. There are question marks you can click on for help with the plugin in case you get lost.

Tracking

You don’t know what you don’t track. Perhaps you are promoting a program that isn’t converting very well as your primary affiliate program yet your secondary affiliate program is converting like hotcakes.  You can track your clicks through your Pretty Link dashboard. Not only will you see how many times someone has visited the link, you’ll also see how many times unique visitors went to said link. In other words you can tell if you have repeat visitors going to a site versus new ones.

Based off the information collected on click thrus you can log into your affiliate program website to see how many sales have been generated. If you’re sending 200 visitors to generate 1 sale for one product yet only 50 visitors to generate 2 sales of another product you now know you should at least switch the order of your affiliate programs.

Link Jacking

To me this is an old wives tale created to sell cloaking software. Yes, most cloaking software sells at prices anywhere from $7 to $197. Some are designed specifically to send visitors back to the webmaster’s site as a favor for cloaking your links (and yes Pretty Link does have an option for you to do this if you’re so inclined.) While it is true that a few people will try to get around you earning a commission, most people surfing the internet are far too lazy (or don’t even know) how to get around you earning a commission. Before December of 2009 US webmasters didn’t even have to alert the general public that the product they were promoting was an affiliate program!

So why cloak?

There are two reasons to really cloak a link. Bruce mentioned one in his recent comment “it looks more professional.” This is especially true in an e-mail, as people don’t really want to see a hop.yourid.product.clickbank.com url nor do they want to click on it. Yet yoursite.com/coolproduct looks much better and appealing to your reader. The second reason is to track. If you’re trying to make money on the internet (or already make money on the internet and want to make more) you have to track your results. There is no way around this. The more you track, the more you can optimize. The more you optimize, the more profit you’ll be putting into your pocket.

Jason Narog is the creator of the royal flush of spades poker card guards and is currently installing Pretty Link onto all his WordPress websites.

Alright so you’ve now signed up and been approved by a poker affiliate site (online poker room, poker merchandise seller, poker software, or poker book site) and now need to place their link on your website.

Where to start?

If you’re using WordPress, the process is fairly simple. Begin by logging into your WordPress dashboard then scroll down to the tab labeled “Appearance.” Click on “Widgets.” Scroll down and find the widget labeled “Text.” Drag the text widget to where you would like your ad to appear (depending on the theme this can vary from left or right, top, bottom, etc.) The top narrow bar is for the title of your new widget. Give your affiliate program a captivating title that is sure to grab a reader’s attention. Now simply paste in the code provided by the poker affiliate site in the bigger box below the title. Click save and your ad is now live on every page of your website.

Location matters

Being that you’re looking to drive traffic to the affiliate program you want to maximize placement of this ad. The typical human eye scans the top left of the page first, meaning that if you want to catch someone’s attention quickly you want the ad closer to the top left of your page than the top right. Where do people typically finish looking at a page? Believe it or not they look at the top right last.

Make your ad words ones of action

Writing an interesting title for your affiliate program helps grab a person’s attention. Try to think from a visitor’s point of view when writing the title. What words would make you want to make the purchase? What words would make your friends want to make the purchase? Action words help as well, as you want your visitors engaged, not passive, just like in the game of poker. Action drives the game.

Want to only promote an affiliate program on one page or post of my website?

Great question. When you create a new post or page in WordPress there are two tabs you can click on in the top right corner, one is labeled “Visual” and the other “HTML.” After you have written your post simply switch over to “HTML” and insert in the affiliate link into your post or page and click save.

Know your product, know how to place your ad!

If you are going this route it is important to make sure you use an intriguing title related to the product you are marketing. If it’s a book by Phil Hellmuth your title should look something like this “Name of book by Poker Legend Phil Hellmuth, Jr.” Do some market research on how stiff the competition is on Google for the product before going this route. If 1,000,000 sites are already promoting the book its probably best to avoid trying to promote this product in a post or page. If less sites are promoting it you have a better chance of people not only seeing your site in the search engine results but giving yourself a nice commission as well.

For American Eyes Only

One word of warning for all you poker affiliates out there living in the good old United States of America. The FTC has now stepped into monitoring affiliate programs online. They’ve deemed it necessary to alert visitors that you will be making a commission for the referral. Do some research on the topic to the best practices of how to comply without hurting your sales at the same time.

Drive traffic to your success

Once you’ve placed your poker affiliate links on your website start driving traffic and you’ll start seeing commission checks. The more traffic, the larger the check.
To Your Poker Website Success,
Jason Narog – Creator of the Royal Flush of Spades poker money clip

I mentioned previously in the “Advertising platform problems put me off working on the site” post that I was having issues with the Ikarus Theme.

Ikarus theme not working

Basically since the update to the latest WordPress version 2.8 (2.8.4 at time of writing) the Ikarus theme is basically broken in several areas and still months after this has happened there does not seem to be any working fixes coming from the developer of the theme. I actually tried to comment on the developer’s site about this and my comments are blocked (for one reason or another), anyway I’ve had to reluctantly abandon using this theme as a result. This has thought me a few different lessons.

• Firstly, it’s important that for whatever theme you choose that either support is readily available to upgrade the theme or the theme itself is simple enough that it’s easily modified to suit new versions of WordPress. Better yet would be if the theme is written in such a way that changes to WordPress and Internet Browsers are likely to have a low probability of breaking the functionality of the theme.
• Fancy Theme = More Issues? Related to the first point. I really liked the Ikarus Theme as it had a lot of different options and functionality. But this seems like it might also be its Achilles heel. Even the developer of the theme months after the initial problems were reported with WordPress 2.8 (and it’s not fully compatible with IE8 either) is unable to fix it, so for webmasters like me who just have limited knowledge of the coding side of things it’s next to impossible to change the Theme when these complicated problems arise. After arriving home and getting back into ‘work mode’ after travelling for the previous month (I really have to stop going on trips!), I thought ok I need to change this theme fast. I picked the thematic theme http://themeshaper.com/ . It lacks a lot of the ‘bells and whistles’ that Ikarus had but it still feels powerful enough. It also works smoothly. The result is my website looks quite bare looking now, but one can still navigate around quite easily. And right now my main concern is that my website is up and running normally once again. Meanwhile, I’m going to continue to see what I can do with this theme and also see if they are other themes out there that I feel would suit where I want to take www.makingapokerwebsite.com.
• Have a backup. Once I started having issues with Ikarus, I had no secondary theme ready and waiting to put in it’s place. This was a bad mistake, in fact this lesson can be applied to many areas of life in general, particularly in regards to your career and business. Basically the old phrase ‘Not to have all your eggs in one basket’ comes to mind, anyway…. before I get too side-tracked, what I’m basically saying is that the smart thing to do would be to have at least 2 themes that you are satisfied with available for use with your WordPress blog, then if for whatever reason your default one becomes broken, then hopefully one of your replacement themes will still work fine, and if and when your theme of choice is fixed then of course you could select it once again if you so wished.

Theme support should not be overlooked

So… to surmise what I’m trying to get at here. Basically the theme you choose should not be just about its functionlity and ‘prettiness’, in fact if anything if the functionaility is very complicated it can prove a liability when it comes to adapting to changes. The level and availability of support for your theme is also very important, perhaps themes built and maintained by a community of enthusiasts might be an area well worth looking at, that way you are not reliant on any one person or company, and last but not least make sure you have a second if not a third and fourth theme ready to substitute for the times if and when your theme of choice no longer functions as expected.

Been doing stuff

It’s been over a week since my last update to this site. I’m not too happy with myself about that, however I do have many other things on the go.

Drifting in Madrid

I was in Madrid for most of the past week for the first event of the 2009 Spanish Poker Tour, so my mind wasn’t really on this blog.

Get real Barry

Anyway excuses aside, the reality is from time to time my attention to this blog will drift. So I believe it’s important to set some realistic goals.

Advance posting

Initially I was doing one entry a day, but I suppose this was always unlikely to be kept up. I’m going to aim to do one entry a week. To ensure I have always something every week I will aim to have my posts done well in advance of publishing them.

Love WordPress

The great thing about WordPress is of course you can set articles to be published at a future date. Of course the aim to have some new post on this site once a week is just a minimum target. If I find that I’m producing posts at a rate far greater rate then I’ll reset my publishing schdeule to 2 or 3 times a week as required.

Implement what’s learned

Anyway I believe I have learned an important lesson for when I come around to doing my poker websites. I need to set a realistic publishing schedule from the start. Once or perhaps twice a week I think would seem about right.

Visit me, please, pretty please

At this point, my making a poker website blog hasn’t had many visitors, but if you are one of the few who has come here for a look, then you’ll notice it’s very basic looking.

Eh got a good personality

In fact this plain look is largely intentional. I am not going to go for a snazzy looking design just for the sake of it. I just want to keep it simple and let the content speak for itself.

Going to get myself some makeup

I do recognise however that the design and outlay of the blog could do with a bit of touching up to make it a more well rounded looking site. Time for me to get to know WordPress a bit better then!

Randy Ray’s your man, if Randy can’t do it, no one can

I’m also going to be looking at Randy Ray’s http://www.pokerseo.org/ site as a sort of reference. 

Getting influenced

Though of course I have no intention of copying his site, the influence of his site will most likely become visible in this site, particularly by the end of the early stages of this site.

Got vision? Oh yes!

As the site grows I envision that the site would develop a more unique looking character, and perhaps doing some things a bit differently from Randy, but nonetheless sticking to the core values that makes Randy’s sites successful.

OKing it with Randy

I haven’t had the chance to ask Randy if this is Ok with him yet, I’m sure it will be as it’s of course an endorsement for his site and for his skills, if it’s not then of course I will have to find another route.