How & Why to Redirect Your Affiliate Links
If you want to keep better track of your links, have more control
over necessary changes to your links and possibly even have more clicks
on your affiliate links, you should be redirecting your affiliate links.
This means where your affiliate link may look like:
http://www.dinewithoutwhine.com/amember/go.php?r=1234&i=l0
You can change it to a link coming from your own website like:
http://www.mydomain.com/dine-without-whine.html
There are a number of reasons to redirect your link and here are a few:
1. Many affiliate links are long and they can actually break into 2 lines if
you’re sending them in an email. Once they break up like that, your readers
won’t be able to click through.
2. Sometimes affiliate programs change their links or even shut down. Dine
Without Whine is going to be here for a long time, but always be safe with
your affiliate links as a matter of practice and redirect them. That means if
you ever need to make changes to your link, you can simply make the change
from your redirected link, instead of trying to find where you placed all
those links on your website and in your emails.
3. If a link is showing as coming from your site, your readers might be more
likely to click on it than if they see a long strange affiliate link direct
from the program. You can even name your file something creative or
descriptive (ex. mydomain.com/best-meal-planning.html) and your readers might
be more likely to click through.
4. If you redirect your links the way we describe in this tutorial, you’ll be
able to log into your website statistics and track click throughs for your
links. The affiliate program you are involved with may already provide some of
these statistics, but you can track multiple links and get all your data from
one place.
5. It makes it easy to remember your affiliates links for promotions on the
fly. Whenever you want to recommend Dine Without Whine or another product,
you’ll know your link right away.
How to make your redirected link:
There are a variety of methods to redirect
a link, but we’re going to keep it simple and use what is called a javascript
redirect.
1. Create a new blank page for your website. Name the page whatever you’d
like (for example: dine-without-whine.html).
2. Remove any HTML code and paste this instead:
3. Be sure to replace http://www.INSERTAFFILIATELINK.com with your full
affiliate link.
4. Test your link to make sure everything is working. Simply type in the
location of your new page into your web browser to ensure it is redirecting
(ex. type in mydomain.com/dine-without-whine.html).
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