Start a Business from Home: How To Create a Re-Direct

As you start a business from home you will find out pretty quickly there are several technical “tricks” that can help you be successful.

One of those “tricks” is to be able to create a redirect from your site to another site.

What is a redirect?  Put simply a redirect is a page on a website the “redirects” the visitor to a different page.  Here are some cases where you would use a redirect:

1. You can use a redirect to send people from your website to an affiliate website.

This is how I send people to my affiliate vendors—I use a redirect.   Go ahead and look at the links here:  http://www.All-In-One-Business.com/rec-rec  each one is a redirect.

Why use them?  Here are just a few of the advantages:

• If your affiliate link ever changes, you just make one change and all of the links are changed.
• They are easier to remember.
• Your visitor doesn’t know he is necessarily visiting an affiliate link.

2. You can use a redirect to take people from an “old” page location to a new one.

From time to time you will have a webpage that you have replaced or updated.  By putting a “redirect page” where the old one used to be, you can automatically take people to the new page.

3. You can use a redirect to “track” visitors.

As you run your site you will want to see where your visitors are coming from.  By using a redirect page you can assign a particular “page” to one ad, and then redirect them from that page to the sales page or other content page you wish for them to see.  Then, by looking at your server logs, you can see how many “hits” your redirect page received to determine how many “click throughs” that ad produced.

For example I use this page:

http://www.All-In-One-Business.com/QB

to track the traffic going to a particular offer I was making.  When you click on it you will see an example of the FOURTH use of a redirect page:

4. You can use a redirect to send people from an expired offer to a current one.

A few times a year I have an offer that expires.  Once it expires I need a way to send people to a different offer that is still valid.  I use a redirect to accomplish this.

As you can see there are many ways to use a redirect page.  Here is a step-by-step plan for creating one on your site.

Step One:  Download the redirect script here:

http://www.All-In-One-Business.com/redirectscript

Step Two:  Open your redirect script with Notepad.

Step Three:  Find the two lines in the script where it says http://www.TargetURL.com and replace the http://www.TargetURL.com with your own URL.

Step Four:  Save the file with the page name you wish to use.

For example:  If you want the page on your site to be named “affiliate.html” then you would save the new file as “affiliate.html”

Step Five: Upload to your website and test.

That’s it!  You just created a redirect on your website.