Have you ever used TinyURL.com? It's a website with a simple mission: 1. You enter a long URL. 2. It gives you a short one you can send to people. This is a great service for people sending long links in emails (that might mess up the formatting)... or using a service like Twitter.com that doesn't let you input a long email. But there are a few BAD things about TinyURL: 1. The TinyURL domain is blacklisted. That means if you use that URL in an autoresponder email, it will most likely end up in the spam box. 2. If you want to make a LOT of URL's (for example, if you had 15 clickbank affiliate links you wanted to make "tiny") then it takes a long time. 3. When you use a service like TinyURL, they can see ALL the traffic going to and from that link. They can even find competitive data like where the user came from, what type of webbrowser they were using, what country they live in, etc... This probably isn't a HUGE issue with TinyURL, but it's nice to keep things as secure as possible. Phantom link cloaker takes care of all these issues. Phantom link cloaker is hosted on ANY domain you choose, and you can use it on as many as you like. Here's how it works: 1. Make sure your server DOES support .htaccess. Contact your Hosting Company to find out. 2. Unzip "massurl.zip" 3. Edit "data.txt" 3. For each URL you want to shorten, type in the short name for the URL, hit TAB, then the long original URL. It will look like this bw http://bobby-walker.com
sales http://saleslettercreator.com NOTE: Make sure you TAB between the short name and the long URL... NOT SPACES! Here's cool pro tip (and the reason we make you use a TAB instead of something else!). To do step 3 quickly (with a large list) You can simply open up Excel, write all the "short names" in Column A ... write the "Long URLs" in Column B. Then highlight both columns and copy/paste them into the data.txt file. Don't worry, this is NOT necessary.. just a quick tip for Excel users out there! Ok, now simply upload ALL the files onto your server (you can choose a subfolder if you wish). Now you simply go to http://www.YOURDOMAIN.com/sales.html and it will redirect to the LONG URL (which is http://saleslettercreator.com in this example). If you went to http://www.YOURDOMAIN.com/bc.html in the example above, it would redirect to Frank's Blog (which is http://bannercloaker.com ) Not only will this shorten many URLs at once, it's also the quickest way to mask a lot of affiliate links at one time. Phantom link cloaker takes care of all the issues.About the Author:
