Affiliate marketing is an area of business which can make you a substantial amount of income without even having your own product or service.
When you become an affiliate of a merchant, he assigns you an affiliate URL. The URL includes your affiliate ID. Whenever you use that URL for promoting the merchant’s products, you get the credit as well as the commission.
Normally, most of the affiliates simply use the URL given by the merchant. the disadvantage of this method is that anyone will be able to notice that it is an affiliate URL and dissuade them from clicking it.
You, as an affiliate marketer should try to be more innovative and cloak or redirect the affiliate link so that visitors do not hesitate to click the link.
In this article, we will see different ways of re-directing your affiliate links which will aid in increased sales and consequently commission for you.
Whenever you use the same affiliate link given by the merchant, the spam filters start to pick up on that domain as being a sales letter email and blocking it as spam. For example,
www.someaffiliateprogram.com/?id=111
By re-directing the link, it will have your domain as the link and help to make it through the spam filters.
Another reason is search engine optimization. If you write articles and submit them with a signature file that has the affiliate link, the affiliate site gets the back links. Plus it makes it easy for people to get rid of your affiliate id.
By using your domain as a redirect to the affiliate program, you get the back links to your site and better SEO rankings.
The next reason is that it will make you look more professional as a marketer and not just someone who is out promoting all kinds of affiliate programs. When potential customers see
http://someaffiliateprogram.com/?id=111, they know it is an affiliate program and will be less likely to click on it.
However, when they see
http://yourdoamin.com/affilliatename or http://yourdomain.com/recommends/program
They will view it more as your personal offer or recommendation.
You can find several software or other methods to change your affiliate links into something more presentable. Many are simple software solutions and can have you changing all your links easily. The programs for changing links do not have to be pricey at all, and many are available as freeware or shareware through popular sites that offer these kinds of products.
Whichever method or software you use, make sure that you use your domain as the frontend URL in web pages. At the back end, let the affiliate link be built into these front end URLs. This will give a better professional look to your affiliate promotions and invite more number of clicks and consequently more conversions and sales.
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi John,
Thanks for your compliment.
Actually, I have a very successful site with SBI and I am also successful as an SBI Affiliate.
Both SBI system as well as Site Build It affiliate program are one of a kind.
Now, coming to link redirections, redirection through sub-domain is a good idea.
But, since last few months, I have been using a new plugin, known as, Ninja Affiliate. I have found this to be superlative and one of a kind.
Among several things that it does, it converts in-post keywords to links (like aLinks plugin) and it also creates search engine friendly URLs from your affiliate links that you can use across domains. And, it also cloaks your links so that you do not lose on your hard earned affiliate commissions.
You must really use it to believe it. And, unlike subdomains, where you need to keep on investing in new domains which means regular additional cost, Ninja Affiliate is a one-time investment which is quite nominal and the support and upgrades are free for life.
In fact, I am so much in love with this plugin that I have planned to write a detailed review on it very soon.
Thanks
Raj
Hi there. Can someone help me clarify on:
1) The use of subdomain?
2) Is it necessary to redirect your subdomain to domain folder?
Thanks
Hi Raj,
That’s good advice.
Another reason to redirect affiliate links is to make it easier to switch products or services if you need to, without tracking down and changing all your advertising, blogging, websites, and so forth.
For instance, if you are recommending a product and the company changes their affiliate program, goes out of business, or does anything else that makes it a bad idea to recommend them, you can easily change your redirection in one place and it will automatically change it everywhere you used that link.
I am an affiliate for SiteSell’s Site Build It! system. One of the benefits of being their affiliate is that you can register domains with an unlimited number of subdomains that can be used for redirecting links very easily.
I’ve registered a couple of these domains and use them to redirect affiliate links. This is just one more way you can do this. The total cost is only $10 per year per domain.
I ran across a situation a few months ago where a company went out of business and I’d been recommending their product. Instead of leaving a lot of dead links, I was able to redirect the subdomain I’d been using to link to their product to now point to a new page on one of my websites where I was able to explain what had happened and to recommend a couple of alternative products.
Without the subdomain redirect, I would have faced the choice of finding and changing all my advertising links or leaving them pointing to nowhere. Either would have been a bad choice. I’ve had to make that choice in the past and that’s one of the main reasons I now use subdomain redirects for most of my affiliate links.
Sometimes, also, affiliate programs change and you have to modify your promotional links.
An example of this is CafePress. They’d been using an internal affiliate program for months and decided they needed to change to Commission Junction.
Of course, that meant a complete change in how affiliates linked to products and sections of the CafePress website.
Fortunately, in CafePress’ case, and to their credit, they came up with an internal way to redirect links for their affiliates’ existing promotions, but, now, affiliates need to go through CJ links to recommend products on CafePress.
Making these kinds of changes is not a problem when you have one or two websites or blogs, but it becomes a bigger problem the more sites you have and the more promotion and advertising you do.
Whichever way you choose to redirect your affiliate links, the more involved you are in affiliate marketing, the more important this becomes.
Act on your dream!
JD
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