If I'm not mistaken, you can't put a personalization token inside a hyperlink in an Aweber message IF you start the link with "http" (FYI when you start a link with "http", Aweber cloaks the link). If you try that, it will break the link (at least that's how it used to be -- I haven't tried in a while though).

So to use a token inside a link, you would have to start the link with "www" (which means that Aweber will not cloak the link).

So if you couldn't cloak the link, then your recipients would see the date in your link, and they could easily bypass your little "trick" by changing the date in the address bar after they click the link.

You could workaround this problem though by doing something like this...

1) On your opt-in page, use PHP to get the Unix Timestamp (which is the # of seconds since 1/1/1970), then pass that number to a hidden field to your opt-in HTML code, which gets passed to Aweber. (You'll have to create a custom field in Aweber for this)

2) In your autoresponder message, make the link in this format (assuming your custom field is named "timestamp")...

www.YourSite.com/offerpage.php?t={!custom timestamp}

When your recipients get the link it will look like...

www.YourSite.com/offerpage.php?t=46372862515

(and 99.9% of them of course won't have a clue what that number means

3) So when they click the link to 'offerpage.php', use PHP code to redirect them to page A if the timestamp is less than 4 days old, or to page B if it's over 4 days old.

I don't have time to do any free coding right now, but it wouldn't take more than a half-hour or so to code the whole thing. Bet you could find someone over at Fiverr to do it.

Hope that helps!

[DELETED]

Hey Brandon - I'd pay for the help

I like your timestamp idea except the sale i will do won't be immediate. It will probably be 3 weeks into the opt in period, and depending on how I set it up (for delivery on certain days of the week) I probably can't predict the exact time of the sale to use the opt in time as an accurate counter.

I think even if aweber cloaks a link, it gets uncloaked in the browser window later, otherwise it wouldn't work, right? All variables need to get passed.

I've done this before with email address appended to URL. It works.

Also, your timestamp idea requires some custom kind of personalization variable and I don't think aweber let's you create custom variables do they?

Oh, I forgot to say that if I insert a date in the URL I wouldn't name it date. I'd call it something like "ref" which wouldn't draw as much attention as "date". I might also throw in some useless crap so ...

http://www.somesite.com?ref=02-12-20...int=08-12-2012

Thanks Brandon - I've gone ahead and hired someone at Fiverr for a quick cut at my initial idea. I don't really mind if the sale is easy to hack for a tech savvy person. But I have to at least try to make it a time limited sale so I'm not being dishonest about the scarcity element of the sale.

The other consideration I have to (maybe) deal with is the A and B landing pages. Say page A is the sale page and Page B is the "sale ended" page.

It would be nice to ensure that people can't visit Page A directly. They can only visit from the redirect script.

I've got no idea how to do this, and it's something for later consideration. Right now I just want to go live with a basic solution.

Brandon - thank you very much for that idea. Looks solid.

Here's the PHP code my Fiverr gig dude delivered. Looks to do exactly what I asked him to do. For $5 it's totally worth it.

<?php
$date = $_GET['date'];
$date_array = explode('-',$date);
$m = $date_array[0];
$d = $date_array[1];
$Y = $date_array[2];
$current_date = mktime(0,0,0,date("m"),date("d"),date("Y"));
$user_date = mktime(0,0,0,date($m),date($d),date($Y));

$diff = $current_date - $user_date;

if($diff <= 345600){
// if less than 4 days
header("Location:http://www.google.com/");
}
else{
// if greater than 4 days
header("Location:http://www.facebook.com/");
}
?>

Hey Guys,

I achieved this with 5 Day Sales Machine product. Let me know if you still have questions.

James

Could another option be to use a "coupon" token based on the date of the mail sent? The potential client would then enter the token and you could redirect the page based on the token age? The token would be given in the body of the mail sent and not part of the URL to click. Someone could fake the URL but would be harder to guess to the token values.

if you are using a wordpress site you can modify the htaccess file

[DELETED]