In an earlier article we discussed the advantages of affiliate marketing; today I’d like to address one of the problems that comes with it - the affiliate link.
A very quick summary: sign up to sell someone else’s product and you’ll be given your own affiliate link. This link is unique to you, so sales resulting from the use of this link will be identified as yours by the product owner and so you will get paid your commission.
That is the theory, anyhow. The problem is this: affiliate links look like, well, like affiliate links! They have a format all of their own; they’re not “proper” English, and don’t look like anything else. This gives rise to two issues:
- theft of the sale
- credibility
Call me an idealist, but I happen to believe that most people are essentially honest. Put someone in a bookstore and, I reckon, a good 99% of the people wanting a book will buy it, rather than try to steal it from the bookseller.
Transfer that situation online, however, and the anonymity that comes with it increases the opportunity for theft. Include a very obvious affiliate link and, to some, it becomes “fair game”. The tactics can range from naive (”that’s a long web address - I’m sure we don’t need to enter all that stuff at the end”) to malicious “that’s an affiliate link - I’ll sign up to the affiliate program myself and buy through my own link”. Either way, though, if that affiliate link is yours, you’ve lost your commission.
This is why you need to redirect your affiliate links.
Redirecting cloaks the affiliate links and protects your commission.
Now there are a number of ways of doing this, but here I’m going to show you what I believe is the quickest and easiest of them all. You don’t need any html skills, you don’t even need a web site - and it’s free. As long as you can copy and paste, you can redirect a link in a couple of minutes.
This method uses TinyURL. CLICK HERE to open the site in a new window.
This is all you do:
- visit the site
- enter your affiliate link
- hit the “Make TinyURL!” button
- copy the resulting TinyURL url, and use it in place of your affiliate link
The resulting url will do the job, but it may not look pretty. You may be able to improve the outcome by using the “Custom alias (optional)” box, but you may have to go with trial and error until you obtain a result you are happy with.
For example, the link for this particular blog article is:
http://recommendedbydavid.com/2009/06/03/redirect-your-affiliate-links/
I tried to convert it to:
http://tinyurl.com/redirect
but it was not available (someone had beaten me to it), so after experimenting I settled for:
http://tinyurl.com/redirect2009
Anyone clicking on that link would be redirected to the original destination at the cloaked URL (using the affiliate link if there had been one).
So there you have it: a quick and easy way to redirect your affiliate links. You’ve protected your link from the theft of the sale, and, especially if you use the “custom alias” option, you’ve increased the credibility of the URL by preventing it from looking like an affiliate link.
“But, hang on”, you may be thinking, “doesn’t the “tinyurl.com” bit of the address lessen the credibility of the whole?”
(You mean you want: quick, easy, free, and IDEAL?)
You’re right, though, we can improve on this solution - and without making it too complicated - and I’ll show you how in my next article.
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