Free Marketing Scripts / Programs / Web Tools

It’s been quite a while since I’ve added free tools & scripts to this website and I am thinking that this is long overdue. While I don’t have a lot of time on my hands because I’ve been so busy writing, it would be nice to take a break every once in a while to create a useful script or web-based tool.

A year or so ago I created an affiliate link cloaking script, I was actually going to list it as a paid script on a domain I had registered… but after running some beta-tests using script newbies, the idea kind of fell apart. I still have the 1 file installation script and maybe I’ll unleash that here for free.

The script is pretty simple, it basically takes an affiliate link:

http://secure.hostgator.com/cgi-bin/affiliates/clickthru.cgi?id=ednit

and turns it into this:

http://robferrall.com/recommends/hostgator/

Much like the simple redirection CGI script that I added to this website so long ago. (the linked to page doesn’t match this template). However, it has a “pretty” interface where you can add & remove affiliate links to be cloaked:

I’ve been writing scripts for years… but I wanted some input as to what types of scripts would be most useful for today’s marketers & webmasters.

Some ideas for scripts:

1. Link tracking script
2. Conversion tracking script
3. Contact form script

Really, this is a pretty short list… but that’s why I’m asking for your help. What I’ll do is after I get some input, I’ll sit down and decide what to create first.

Something that should be said – I code in CGI, I don’t know much more than a lick of PHP. I can write a program to interact either with a MySQL database or a flatfile database.

Any ideas or suggestions, please submit them here in this post.