Ever see a great affiliate offer but it was unrelated to your niche?  This tutorial will show you how to run your own affiliate ads over ad networks like Project Wonderful and Adtoll by using a redirect page.   Normally this is difficult because the affiliate network’s URL often contains weird characters like question marks that the ad network won’t accept.   Before you launch an ad campaign based upon these techniques, be sure to check the Terms of Service for both ad networks involved.   An additional advantage of this technique is that you can also collect data on clicks directly.  I’ve seen a huge discrepancy between clicks reported and click received.

Setup: 

  1. I suggest creating a subdomain.  In my case I use ads.turnipofpower.com. 
  2. Create a robots.txt file that blocks all search engines from that directory.  Take notepad, paste the following two lines of code into the file, save it as robots.txt and upload it to your ad subdomain.

    3. User-agent: *
    Disallow: /

  3. Create another file in notepad that is blank.  Call it index.html and upload it to the same ads directory as the robots.txt file.  This will prevent someone from easily seeing the directory contents.

Get the affiliate code: 

  1. This technique works best when everyone else isn’t running the same damn ad as you.  Choose something that will appeal to the niche on the sites you are targeting.   Running yet another hosting ad is pointless.   I suggest choosing a Pay-Per-Lead ad instead of  Pay-Per-Sale, this way you get paid just for signing people up.  The king of Pay-Per-Lead offers is Clickbooth, with thousands of high paying ads to choose from.  Pepperjam and Shareasale also have many pay per lead offers.
  2. Log into the affiliate and pick an offer.  If you want to use one of their banners, that’s fine.  You can also make your own banner.  This is my favorite trick because I have no competition.  If a company does not offer a 125×125 ad, I create my own.  Sometimes you have to get approval first if you create your own ad.  Again, read the Merchant TOS for each program.
  3. Save the ad image by right clicking it and choose “save picture as”. We will use this later.
  4. Look for the link to the affiliate, not the link to the banner image.  It’s probably encrypted and might have question marks and other punctuation symbols in it.  For my example I will use a simple one for Autobarn: http://www.tkqlhce.com/email-2708092-7391913. Paste your link into notepad for the next step.

Create the redirect page:

The following is the template I use to create the redirect.  It’s done using a meta tag in the header.  You can see how I placed the above link into the code, and also called the page “Auto”.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<head>

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=http://www.tkqlhce.com/email-2708092-7391913">

<title>Auto</title>

</head>

<body>

</body>

</html>

Now save the page using whatever title you gave it.  I called my page “Auto”, so I save the file as auto.html and upload it to the same ads directory.  This makes the URL ads.turnipofpower.com/auto.html in my example.  If you click that URL you will see it goes straight to Autobarn.

Placing your ad:

  1. Log into your ad network and pick a site to advertise on.  Try to find one that fits the niche your ad targets and has plenty of page views, preferably from the US if the ad targets US customers only.
  2. Place the URL we created in the step above as the URL you want your ad to point to.  In my example I would paste http://ads.turnipofpower.com/auto.html
  3. Upload the ad image from your hard drive we saved earlier when it asks for an image.

That’s it, Done!

Of course you can get much fancier using tracking pixels, analytics, and so on.  Don’t expect a huge amount of sales from a single ad.  Remember how well similar ads perform on your own site.  How many clicks do you get there?  Still, it’s a great opportunity to see how a particular ad works on a particular site or niche.  If the ad does really well, then you can contact the website owner and negotiate a deal for a higher position on the site.

Add to Reddit.com RSS Feed Add to Technorati Favorites Stumble It! Digg It! Mixx It!