Redirect Your MySpace Traffic With Flash
By Brian Vuyk

Well, we all know that MySpace pages have the potential to drive a ton of traffic.

Sure, it takes some work to build an extensive network, but eventually many people have gotten their MySpace pages to the point where they might have 1000+ uniques per day running through these pages.

Many slightly devious minds have realized the selling potential of these pages, and place affiliate programs on their MySpace pages, hawking everything from ringtones to jewelry to pr0n and other less ethical products. Now, if you are using MySpace for affiliate marketing, I am sure that you must be somewhat frustrated with the limited freedom you have in creating Myspace pages. In short, they suck.

So, wouldn’t it be nice if you could redirect all of your MySpace visitors to a landing page or website of your choice? Well, this isn’t nearly difficult as you might think. Let’s set up a Flash redirect. To pull this off, you will need a Linux box, and a text editor, and a server of your own somewhere.

First things first, you must install the Ming package. Ming is a library for generating Macromedia Flash files (.swf). This can be done in any Debian based Linux distribution by opening the command prompt and running:

apt-get install libming-util

Now, in your favorite text editor, create a file with the following text:

getURL(”http://www.example.com”);

Substitute the URL for the site you want to redirect to in place of ‘www.example.com’ above. Save this file as redirect.as. Now run the command:

makeswf redirect.as

This will produce a file called out.swf. Upload this file to a webserver where you can now fetch it from an external page.

The final step is to include the new flash file in your MySpace page. Include the following code somewhere on your MySpace page:

embed allowScriptAccess=”always” allowNetworking=”internal” enableJavaScript=”false” xsrc=”http://www.example.com/path/to/out.swf” mce_src=”http://www.example.com/path/to/out.swf” quality=high pluginspage=”http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” width=”200″ height=”200″>/embed>

Make sure to change the src tag in the code above to point to the location of your out.swf. And fix the embed tags - I had to break them so they would display. This will enable you to redirect your visitors to the page you specified when creadting your redirect.as. Good Luck!

P.S this may not work for much longer. MySpace is upgrading to Flash 9. This code may or may not work. The issue is that MySpace is now forcing allowScriptAccess=”never” on all embeds, which stops the browser from redirecting. If anyone knows how to avoid this, please comment!

Did you like this article? Keep up with Brian’s expert search optimization tips and tricks at http://www.caydel.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Brian_Vuyk

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