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I can pretty much guarantee that the hammer wasn’t initially engineered for wall picture frame hanging duty, but it sure does come in really handy for that, doesn’t it? Some of the best tools are like that: They are quite versatile, very useful (critical even) for a wide variety of applications.

That’s what I think about ProLinkz’s utility and value. Especially now that it’s totally free.

ProLinkz is a CGI Perl script for your Web server… software, in other words, for use on your website. It’s a link redirector/cloaker and it also tracks and counts the clicks on those links, giving you pretty useful info on those links’ activity and traffic on demand.

Nifty, huh? Well, nifty enough for us to sell it for $45 anyway, which we did for a few years. “We” is my friend, master programmer William Bontrager, and me. Recently, William and I decided to quit selling ProLinkz and just allow everyone to install and use it on their websites if they want.

Yeah yeah yeah, you say, it’s good for creating cloaked affiliate links; and branding all links with your domain; and keeping track of advertising/promotion performance, etc. etc. etc.

But so what?

Didn’t I just tell you that some of the best tools were also versatile? Here’s one way I used ProLinkz beyond the obvious, just to give you a taste and inkling of some of the many ways you can put this baby to work as a tool for wordpreneurs - writers - publishers.

I used ProLinkz for all the outbound links in my ebook, GolfIncome: eBay.

Here’s the basic idea of what I did: For every single link that appeared in the ebook — say a recommendation for a book for purchase on Amazon — instead of including a link that looked something like this (an annoyingly long one to boot, which is typical):

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1582974969…blah blah blah

I set it up on ProLinkz and created a “Tracking Code” that actually redirected to the link above, but looked something like:

http://golfincome.com/cgi-bin/pl.pl?example

Shorter. Cleaner. Branded by the golfincome.com domain name. The same end destination… and each time someone clicks or visits that link, ProLinkz logs and counts it.

That’s it. But besides getting insight into what links the readers are actually interested enough to click on, do you realize the implications? Here are just a couple:

• Every time a link changes or disappears (talk about typical), I can simply edit the link within the ProLinkz database without needing to physically update the book. I can, in other words, change link destinations at will.
  
• If illegal copies of the ebook get out — a pretty good likelihood with ebooks — I may be able to detect increased link click activity that would often accompany this kind of illegal distribution.

If the second thing happens, by the way, what I would do then is reissue a new edition of the ebook with all new ProLinkz links. I would, however, keep all the previous ProLinkz links that appeared in the previous edition, but this time have them all redirect to a new page on my site that will tell them they’re reading a stolen copy, and that if they want the real link destination, to please go buy a legit one.

And did I mention ProLinkz is also good for a bunch of other more traditional website link stuff?

Powerful, versatile tool. And it’s now free. Go check it out.

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