Xoxo, everyone — it’s Reznik, and today we’re going to jam a domain’s square peg into a smartlink’s round hole.
Smartlinks are getting more popular in the CPA world by the day. Nobody really knows what kind of beast this is, but the word itself is beautiful, stylish, trendy, and hip either way. Ideally, a smartlink should boost your cash flow — in reality, it’s trying hard too.
As you know, from a technical standpoint a smartlink works as a redirect — meaning it forwards the visitor to the target site. It’s generally believed that Facebook doesn’t like redirects, so you should avoid them. But Facebook definitely likes tits and dick creams even less, so using your main target domain directly can also be risky.
To solve these enormous problems — clearly made up and having nothing to do with reality — we’re going to force that square peg into the round hole. Or, more precisely, park the domain directly on the smartlink. What we should end up with is a domain that shows different sites depending on what the smartlink wants. No redirects, no iframes, no registration and SMS.
Important note! In some cases, depending on the site, a redirect can still happen. But! It happens inside the domain, which means it’s completely safe from a traffic standpoint. A redirect will occur if the smartlink doesn’t point to the target site’s home page, or if it sets additional parameters and cookies.
What We’ll Need
The parking procedure doesn’t require any special knowledge. If you’ve worked with cloaking or your own landing pages before, none of this will look strange to you. And if you haven’t, why would you even be parking a domain on a smartlink?
- A smartlink from an affiliate network or a cloaking service.
- Hosting with PHP support. Pretty much the cheapest plan will do.
- A domain, added to your chosen hosting.
- A couple of files from the AlterCPA White proxy.
For hosting, the Mini plan from www.host-food.ru or the Promo VPS from timeweb.com will work fine, for example. You can grab a domain on a deal at reg.ru. As the proxy, we’ll use Belizna — AlterCPA White — which you can read more about here: https://gitlab.com/altervision/altercpa-white.
How to Set Everything Up
Setup won’t take much of your time. We’re assuming you’ve already bought hosting and already attached a domain to it. The domain opens and shows your hosting’s placeholder page. We’re also assuming you know how to upload files to that hosting over FTP, using something like FileZilla.
Step 1. Downloading Belizna
Download Belizna’s files from the repository at this link: AlterCPA White — and unpack them into any folder you like. From the archive, you’ll need two files — index.php and .htaccess — you can delete the rest.
Step 2. Setting Up the Site
Open the index.php file in your favorite text editor (I wonder if there are idiots out there who’d open it in Word?) and make the following changes to it:
Find a line that looks like this (it’s probably line 31):
#define( 'SMARTLINK', 'https://your.smart/link?url' );
Remove the # character at the start of the line and replace the URL with your smartlink’s address, so you end up with this:
define( 'SMARTLINK', 'https://natribu.org/?welcome' );
If you don’t want a redirect to happen the first time the site opens, add or uncomment the constant that disables the redirect:
define( 'SMARTBASE', true );
Don’t forget to save the file! You can also check out the additional settings on the AlterCPA White repository’s wiki page.
Step 3. Uploading the Files to the Hosting
Connect to your hosting over FTP using FileZilla or a similar program. Copy the .htaccess file from the distribution and your edited index.php into the domain’s root folder. That’s it.
The Barrel of Honey
So basically, all you have to do is download Belizna, plug in your smartlink, and upload it to your hosting. In these three steps, we get a working site that sorts out the smartlink itself and shows whichever site it decides on. That would be perfect, if not for …
A Spoonful of Tar, a Tub of Slop, and a Tanker of Shit
Of course, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. A parked domain like this will work perfectly only with decent sites, which, sadly, are a minority. It’s most likely a fantastic fit for product traffic.
Some sites, like webcam services or dating sites, turned out to be so souped-up that Belizna’s entire feature set isn’t enough to proxy their traffic. They’ve got a whole range of protection mechanisms whose job is to block not just fraud, but also our feeble attempts to display the site through a proxy. On top of that, they use a ton of modern, heavyweight technologies that simply can’t be intercepted and proxied either.
Some smartlink providers can’t properly analyze request headers and client IP addresses, so they’ll send visitors anywhere except the right address.
Some affiliates, when building their sites, achieve a zen mastery of duct-taping together hacks and reinventing wheels out of shit and sticks, so all the links on their site fall apart, registration starts leading nowhere, and instead of a nice picture you get a spreading puddle of JS excrement.
Conclusion
You can park a domain on a smartlink using AlterCPA White, but carefully. Always make sure to test that the entire mechanism works properly through the proxy.
That’s it from Reznik — xoxo, everyone!