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The basic idea is very simple. You need to tell your visitors that if they paste the following code into their

HTML pages, they get a free fortune cookie:

<a href=”http://seophp.example.com”>

<img src=”http://seophp.example.com/fortune_cookie.php” border=”0”>

</a>

<br />Get your free

<a href=”http://seophp.example.com”>cookies at Cookie Ogre’s Warehouse</a>.

What’s interesting about this code is that it not only delivers the fortune cookie, but it also includes a link

to your web site (and the tool, so others may get fortunes). A small amount of users may remove the link,

but a significant amount will leave the link around the image. You’re providing your visitor with a free

service, in exchange for some publicity.

The code of the fortune cookie generator itself is simple. It simply takes a random text from an array, and

displays it over the cookie image contained in

fortune_cookie.gif

. If you had more entries, it would

make more sense to use a database, but for simplicity’s sake you store the possible fortune phrases into

an array:

class Fortunes

{

// Array with possible fortune predictions

var $_fortunes = array(

“Jaimie Sirovich will become your\r\nfavorite author.”,

“You will recommend this book to\r\nall your friends.”,

“Tomorrow you will make \r\nyour first million.”,

“You will read AJAX and PHP: \r\nBuilding Responsive Web Applications.”

);

The code that adds the text over the .gif image template is very simple as well. You used the

image-

createfromgif

,

imagettftext

, and

imagegif

functions of the GD2 library to generate and output

the fortune cookie image:

// Generate fortune cookie image

function MakeFortune()

{

$text = $this->_fortunes[rand(0, sizeof($this->_fortunes) - 1)];

$this->_image_resource = imagecreatefromgif(‘images/fortune_cookie.gif’);

imagettftext($this->_image_resource, 9, 0, 135, 64,

imagecolorallocate($this->_image_resource, 0, 0, 0),

‘fonts/comic.ttf’, $text);

imagegif($this->_image_resource);

}

Keep in mind that this is just one hypothetical example of link bait. Because we cannot possibly assist

readers with all of their ideas for link bait, we will suggest that if you do have a great idea, but cannot

implement it yourself, that you can use a service like eLance (

http://www.elance.com/

), which can

assist you in finding a freelance programmer. For simple projects this can be very effective.

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Chapter 10: Link Bait

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