Pardon Me, But Is That Your Link That’s Showing?

Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 12:22 PM

If you are doing any marketing online, but I am sure that one of the things you’re doing is promoting products for other people as affiliates. The great thing about this, is you sign up for their affiliate program, then you grab some tools, like banners and ads, then you’re given an affiliate link to use.

It makes it all very simple, as all you have to do is slap your affiliate link in an e-mail, or post on your site, and when people click on that link they are taken to the marketer’s site and if they buy, then you get paid.

But here’s something I want you to consider.

How is that affiliate link affecting your sales? More to the point, how many sales do you lose by using that long, ugly affiliate link that you’ve been given?

You know the link I am talking about. It’s a long ugly string of letters and numbers, but quite frankly has a tendency to put people off. Even worse, is realizing that people are less likely to use that link, because they know it’s an affiliate link.

Let’s consider the typical ad that most people send out to promote a product. It could be something like this:

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I wanted to let you know about an exciting new product that’s been put out today by a good friend of mine and a sure to solve all your marketing problems at one time. You can see for yourself, by going here:

http://www.awesomesoftware.com/rep/us.cfm?u=123456789/welcome.cgi?181/index.html

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Now, let me ask you. What is wrong with this picture?

It’s pretty obvious, that ugly, obnoxious looking link that’s part of the ad.

So, what do YOU type into your browser? Do you type that big long URL in to see what it is that is being offered? I doubt it. I mean, who’s got the time to mess with it. Here’s what most people don’t type in.

http://www.awesomesoftware.com

Face it friend, you just lost a sale and you’re not in this to lose money.

There’s got to be a better way to go about doing this and fortunately there is. It’s called link cloaking.

Always link cloaking involves is setting up a special page that includes your affiliate link and redirects to the seller site. It’s very simple to do it only takes a few minutes to set up. But the advantage is that people are more likely to click on the link in your ad because it’s easy to do.

Now, let’s look at the same ad using a redirect page with your affiliate link as part of it.

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http://www.myaffiliatesite.com/mb.html

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See the link above? This is a page you created it have on your website that redirects to the seller’s website, has your affiliate link involved and if the person buys, you will get credit for the sale. And the added benefit is it keeps competing affiliates from changing your affiliate ID to theirs and them getting the sale.

Here’s how it works.

You are going to have to create a new page for your web site that invisibly forwards your visitor on to the site for the product you’re promoting. This page will have an immediate refresh rate so that as soon as your visitor clicks the link, he or she is redirected.

Here is the code you will use. Everything from <html> to </html>.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

<html>

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Now, save that page is an HTML page and using our example above, you would name it mb.html. Then, upload it to your server and you’re good to go. See how easy that was. Your affiliate link is embedded in the HTML page and will guarantee you the affiliate sale if the person buys.

Now, if you want to get really fancy, you can create the redirect as a PHP file. Here’s how you do it.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

<?php
header( ‘Location: http://www.awesomesoftware.com/rep/us.cfm?u=123456789/welcome.cgi?181/index.html’ ) ;
?>

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Using the same example as above, save the page as mb.php, upload it to your server and you’re done.

So, let me ask you this. Which link is more appealing and one that people are more apt to click based on what they see.

This:

http://www.awesomesoftware.com/rep/us.cfm?u=123456789/welcome.cgi?181/index.html

Or this:

http://www.myaffiliatesite.com/mb.html – http://www.myaffiliatesite.com/mb.php

See the difference? I’ll let you decide.

Now you have to understand, that this will only work if you have your own hosted website. You should, and at some point you will need one. But the convenience it provides is priceless.

Scripts and Services

Another option you have, if you have your own hosted website, is to use a link cloaking script. The one I highly recommend is affiliate profit linker. It does basically the same thing as above, but it’s all automated and maintained from a central control panel. It’s very handy when I need to set up an affiliate link for a promotion and want to be able to track the number of clicks I get from it. You can find out more about it here:

Affiliate Profit Linker

Or if you’re in the position of not having a website, then you could always use a URL shortening service which you can find by doing a search on Google. There’s quite a few of them out there, but the downside is if you have a lot of links set up in the service goes belly up, then all your hard work and effort is lost. That’s one reason I always recommend a hosted script like I use about.

But if you decide that a URL shortening service is what you need to use for the time being, but here’s the one I use that I also highly recommend. It has a very user-friendly control panel and has a lot of nice tools like stats tracking, geo-tracking, etc. You’ll find it here:

Scrnch Me

Whatever you decide, please stop using those ugly, obnoxious affiliate links and start making sales.