The Importance Of Using Cloaked Links In Emails

Believe it or not, there are no "official" internet police. Most of the internet is like the old west 150 years ago -- anything goes as long as you can get away with it, and you might be hung from a tree if you get caught.

Everybody get tons of junk mail, right? If you're new to the internet and aren't getting any yet, just wait a year or so.

I think that's why services like twitter and Facebook and texting on phones has gotten so popular in part -- because it's immune from people jamming their unwanted junk mail in your face.

In order to deal with this onslaught from the never ending stream of junk mail, certain enterprising individuals have declared themselves the "junk mail police" and have set up a mafia-like organization that shoots people in the knees (figuratively speaking) if they cross the line.

The trouble is, most people are unaware of some of the tactics that are being used. Mainly, they're in the form of "blacklists". Once your email address or domain name is on one of these blacklists, you're in deep doo-doo.

If you're somebody who sells products through an affiliate network, then LISTEN UP! You could be in danger of getting YOUR DOMAIN NAME blacklisted!

Basically there are two types of blacklists you can get put on. One is as a spammer -- someone who sends out big batches of junk mail using the same FROM email address in a short period of time. People who do this usually are not very educated about ways of how email works. They get trapped really fast.

A second type of blacklist you can end up on is based on CONTENT analysis of emails. If a big burst of emails is found to contain the same pattern of data, and many of them are flagged as spam, then the links contained in the CONTENT can be added to a blacklist.

I'm going to talk about a couple of these CONTENT-BASED blacklists here because they're quite invisible and not well understood.

Then I'll talk about how to deal with them. It's actually quite simple, but you have to get your Affiliates to help you.

This is one of those really counter-intuitive things that people just don't seem to get.

Most people think that they only need to worry about getting their own domain name or email address blocked if they send out too much junk mail. This isn't completely true. You can also cause domain names contained in the content of your messages to get added to blacklists - and nobody will ever tell you, them, your customers, or their customers!

The OB-SURBL (OutBlaze SURBL) is one of many BLs ISPs use that is set up to do just this. (see surbl.org)

Some ISPs have their MTAs (Mail Transfer Agents) set up to scrub all of their incoming email traffic through this and other BLs immediately upon receipt - but before it gets stuffed into users' mailboxes.

This is analogous to what happens when you send letters to elected officials in Washington, DC - everything goes to a special mail facility that scans them for contaniments and other "bad stuff", before sending it to the main mail room at the Capital Building Complex. This place is actually miles away from the Capital, in case someone tries to send an explosive device like a letter bomb. Anything that even smells like it's not kosher (pardon the pun) gets destroyed. Nobody is notified, except a record of it is kept by the "mail police".

The OB-SURBL acts the exact same way - examines the CONTENTS of emails and records statistics of all URLs contained in them. If it sees a spike in the contents of an email over a fairly narrow time period, it will put all of the domain names LISTED IN THAT EMAIL into its BL.

From that point on, every one of the emails that it scrubs that contain, or are FROM, ANY of the domain names on the BL will simply be deleted. They won't be delivered to anybody. There is no notice given to the senders, to the domain name owners, or the expected recipients.

My viraldocumenttoolkit.com domain was used by somebody in the first week after it was registered and got onto the OB-SURBL, which is how I discovered this issue. It took me more than a week to get it off.

The annoying thing is that when you contact these self-appointed internet police, they are communicating with you as if YOU are a SPAMMER. I was the domain name owner demanding to know why and how my domain name ended up on their blacklist!

They gave me a list of email addys from people who reported messages containing my domain name, and demanded that I show where THESE people opted-in to MY list, along with their IPs, and contact info. I had ONLY sent emails to my CUSTOMERS at that point, and I have no clue who sent the emails out that contained my domain name. I can only presume that they were promoting the product as an affilaite. These jerks would not give me any useful info, including who sent these emails - which they DO KNOW since they keep copies of them all.

This is the same thing that happend to Jeff Walker during the first Product Launch Formula launch.

I suspect that auto-responder venderos like AWeber have arrangements with these folks to keep them from getting blocked, along with the link-shortening domains. However, I've been to at least one public place that's got their wireless router set to actively block traffic from tinyurl.com - for unknown reasons.

As a vendor with affiliates who are promoting your products, you need to basically prohibit them from using your affiliate links directly in their emails. Instead, require them to use some kind of REDIRECT LINK.

Sometimes these are called cloaked links.

Most people think of using cloaked links simply to hide their affiliate links. They're actually more useful than that! For one thing, they'll keep your domain name from getting snagged in a CONTENT BLACKLIST like the OB-SURBL.

I personally use a php script called "Power Link Generator", from Mike Filsaime. PLG is a very handy script that you host on your own domain that lets you not only create redirect links that hide your affiliate links, but it also maintains counters on how many people click on the link. I'm trying to get them to collect more info, like data on individual clicks.

I've been using PLG on my own domain for a couple of years now. But with the increase in use of services like Twitter.com that automatically shrinks most URLs you give it, I figured it would be handy to start doing that myself. So for every redirect link I create with PLG, I also create a shorter version using tinyurl.com, is.gd, or one of the many other link shortening services that are available. Then I save this shorter URL in the Comments section of the campaign I created with PLG, and use that in most of my emails and public posts now. (See the PLG link above? Hover your mouse over it and see what I'm using for a link.)

I use PLG because I like to be able to track the results of my efforts - how many people click on a given link. Usually it's highest within 24-48 hours after it has been published, but it's interesting to watch the activity over time. Most folks don't care; they just use PLG to hide their affiliate links. That's fine. But if you don't care about the click-thru stats, then just use a link-shortener service, like tinyurl.com and the others.

However, I'd say that from a purely statistical standpoint, it's best to use your own domain names as redirect links in emails that you send directly, and then only use them in small batches. The reason is that unless you send thousands of emails a day, your domain names will get far less exposure than any other choices you could make.

For larger mailings, stick with what your AR vendor supplies (like aweber). If they don't (like EMailAces), then be judicious and use care in what you choose for a redirect domain name. TinyURL.com is already being blocked. Twitter automatically uses several link-shorteners, but as they do, those domain names will get increasing exposure, leading to higher likelihood that THEY will start being blocked as well.

Here is a simple example of a redirect script you can use on your own domain. Simply paste this into a text editor like Notepad, change the domain names and URLs to be whatever you need, and save it as somefile.html in one of your hosting accounts. If that was for mydomain.com and the file you saved it as was myredirect.html, then you'd simply use: http://mydomain.com/myredirect.html in your emails and wherever else you want to use it. That safely and securely hides the link from prying eyes and minimizes the risk that the domain name in the URL contained in it will get stuck on a blacklist.

(sorry, I don't know how to format this so it looks good.)
-------------------------------------------
<html>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL=http://targetURL.com/your_aff_ID">
<title>Put A Page Title Here</title>
<body>
<script>
document.location.href = "http://targetURL.com/your_aff_ID";
</script>
<div align="center">
<font color="#000000" size="2" face="tahoma">
<b><font size="4">Loading the page</b>
<br><br><br>
Please wait...</font>
<br><br><br><br>
</div>
</body>
</html>
-------------------------------------------

The script above uses two separate mechanisms to ensure that the visitor will get redirected quickly and effectively. Simply change the two lines that say: http://targetURL.com/your_aff_ID to whatever URL you want people to visit. This would be your affiliate link or whatever.