Thought it was about time I wrote something on my long-neglected blog - it’s been a really busy last few months one way and another, but I currently have some time on my hands as I’m having a month off and currently staying in Toronto but more about that later.

Just a quick and hopefully useful post on how to use cloaking/redirects to help get your ads approved on sites like Myspace, Facebook etc. As anyone who’s tried knows, it can be a pretty frustrating experience. Myspace aren’t nearly as bad as Farcebook, but you do get the odd ad disapproved for no apparent reason. Often the problem with FB is that the human ad reviewer is in a different geographic location to the ads target - so when they view your link expecting to see some dating offer or whatever, they get the network default ‘glittery smiley frickin toolbar’ offer or whatever your network offers for traffic outside the required geo-IP range. And then shortly after your ad gets disapproved.

The easy way around this is to upload your ad linked to a page hosted by you - either have the page redirect to the offers landing page (direct, without affiliate tracking), or just make a real crappy lander and put it up - the html email - type banners offered for most campaigns work well for this. For this post we will just use redirects though to keep it simple.

Then, as and when your ad gets approved, you sneakily alter the page to redirect to the offer this time using your affiliate link. Example steps below:

1: You create a folder on your server called whatever, and upload a file to it called ‘index.html‘ or ‘index.php‘ depending on your preference. One or other though, not both!

‘index.html‘ contains the javascript redirect below, nothing else:

<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
window.location = "http://www.LINK-TO-YOUR-OFFER-DIRECT.com"
//-->
</script>

Or, if you prefer the php equivalent (they both essentially do the same thing), your ‘index.php‘ would contain just this redirect (note you MUST change the extension to .php though!):

<?php
header("Location:http://www.LINK-TO-YOUR-OFFER-DIRECT.com");
?>

2: You submit your ad, using the url of http://my-server.com/whatever as its destination.

3: Have a beer or 10 while Farcebook review your ad and url, which is neatly redirecting to the offer page. Keep checking to see if your ad got approved, as you need to switch links ASAP when it does.

4: Celebrate if/when your ad is approved, and then quickly alter the redirect url in your index.html or index.php file to the one you need to use for your affiliate network to track leads. Like this:

<?php
header("Location:http://www.valtrk.com/URL/track.aspx?AdID=XXXXX&AffID=XXXXX&subID=XXXXX");
?>

(I’ve used the .php redirect as my example, the principal is the same for either though).

5: Upload your modified index page to the folder you created earlier, test it works ok, sit back and check/wait for leads!

Obviously you could also use cloaking for other means, for instance sneaking through a dating offer of more ‘adult’ nature than would normally be approved, or a diet offer. Do bear in mind though that sometimes ads are retroactively policed, and you may get the odd one banned down the road but such is life, and hopefully you’ll have made some money by then! It’s a useful tool/trick to have in your box though.

The example above just redirects any visitor to the page or folder blindly, it’s a very lightweight form of cloaking - you could play around with it and get it to redirect based on referrer if you really wanted to hide something.

You can also use cloaking to quickly and easily test an offer for example - start by linking to your own beautiful lovingly crafted review-blog-landing page, and then if its not making money or having good ctr to the offer, switch out the index page for a redirect and send the traffic right to the offer, randomise the redirect to split-test offers or your own landing page versions - the possibilities are endless!

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