Warning: Don’t Be Seduced By StoreStacker

A new affiliate tool has just been released, and you’re bound to be bombarded by a ton of marketers telling you how great it is. Do not listen to them!

The product is called StoreStacker. It promises that you can easily and quickly setup affiliate stores using products from many sources. You can even auto publish content by scraping other’s RSS feeds. The whole thing is automatic… just set it up, walk away, and enjoy the commissions.

The trouble is this method NEVER works. Sure you might install 20 stores… or 100 stores… and find short term success, but you’ll never build up a source of long-term stable income.

Do you really think it’s as easy as buying a piece of software, installing it to a domain, picking a niche, and setting up scraped RSS content? Listen, I know how strong the desire can be to find a silver bullet that will earn you a lot of money for little effort, but that silver bullet doesn’t exist.

If you want to buy StoreStacker, then that’s fine, as long as you understand that if you want long term success, you will need to treat it like any other authority site. You will need to publish original content that provides value to your niche and your visitors, which takes time and effort.

Please… if you are reading this… do not be seduced by StoreStacker. I won’t tell you not to buy it, but I won’t be recommending it either.

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Masking Affiliate Links with WP-Affiliate

If you use WordPress in any of your marketing efforts (and you should be), you probably need a way to mask your affiliate links. If that’s you, there’s a free plug-in you need to know about called WP-Affiliate.

WP-Affiliate let’s you setup blog-wide masked (cloaked) affiliate links. Basically you enter in the anchor text and the actual URL, and the plug-in will give you a masked URL you can use within posts on your blog.

So as an example, if you had an affiliate link that looked like this:

http://www.affiliateproduct.com/myaffiliateid/?=myaffiliatetrackingid

WP-Affiliate could transform that link to look like this instead:

http://www.mydomain.com/recommends/affiliateproduct

I think you’ll agree that second domain looks much nicer, and would provide a better experience for your blog’s readers. You can actually see how the plug-in works by clicking any of the links on this post!

Installing and configuring WP-Affiliate is really easy… just upload the plug-in to your site, activate it from the admin dashboard, and then setup your links from the options area in the write/edit post page.

The downside to WP-Affiliate is that it won’t automatically link your chosen anchor text. You use it to create the links, but then you have to manually add them to your post. It does have a shortcut to send your link to the editor window, but that is still a manual effort.

However considering how well it does what it does—and especially considering the price—I plan on using WP-Affiliate on this blog, and I encourage you to do the same!

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3 Tools for Your Affiliate War Chest

I’ve recently obtained three tools for my own personal affiliate war chest. I plan to post an in-depth review of each tool after I’ve had more time to work with them, however I wanted to give you a heads-up in case you wanted to check them out now.

JohnCow’s “Build a Business Not a Blog” eBook
This eBook is full of amazing information on how to setup and run a blog as a business. It teaches you everything from which plug-ins to use, to how to build up a visitor base and monetize your efforts. The best thing about this eBook is the price… zero.

Traffic Travis
This is an amazing software tool that I just purchased a few days ago. It does keyword research, SEO analysis, but the best feature is the PPC spy tool! You can enter in your list of longtail keywords, and then schedule Traffic Travis to check the running Google PPC ads for those keywords each day. This helps you determine which longtail keywords are making others money. Truthfully I’m not sure how useful the keyword and SEO tools are going to be compared to other tools I already own, but the PPC tool is the reason I purchased the software.

Blog Mastermind
Blog Mastermind is a coaching program that teaches you everything about setting up a successful blog. This isn’t a typical blogging eBook or anything like that… instead it’s a full coaching program. There’s 27 lessons, 5 advanced lessons, over 30 hours of audio, hours of video, live student/teacher Q&A conference calls, and more! I’m not going to say any more about this now, because I just purchased it a week ago, and quite honestly I’m already overwhelmed with the quantity and quality of the material. I just need to work through each lesson one at a time, and once I’ve gotten through more of the material, I will keep you updated on my progress. I’ll know soon enough if the coaching is worth the investment I made in it.

Well that’s it for now. Stayed tuned for those in-depth reviews, but in the meantime, you now know the tools I’ve been using lately to boost my online profits… so enjoy!

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