Internet Business Blog

Today, I received an email from Article Marketer telling me that because their affiliate system was unreliable and not tracking sales properly they’d changed to using a new system. The old system had been switched off and the new system was now in place.

As an affiliate, this meant that all of my existing referral links were broken. Any affiliate links that I’d placed on my websites, on other people’s websites, in articles that were already syndicated across hundreds of different websites, in ebooks that were sitting on people’s hard drives and in the emails in people’s inboxes had been rendered useless. Can you imagine just how many hours of work goes into a well publicised affiliate link only to be obliterated in one swift move.

Fortunately for me, I can deal with this sort of situation in under 2 minutes and get on with my day as if nothing had ever happened. Just as I did when Text Link Ads changed their affiliate link structure again.

How did I do this and how can you save yourself from a potential disaster that could happen when you least expect it? The solution is to use URL redirects. With a suitable system, such as Affiliate Link Tracker, you can effortlessly manage all of your affiliate links and divert your affiliate marketing income away from the iceberg that is a change of referral tracking system.

How will you cope if the merchants you promote suddenly decide to change their affiliate link system?  Consider your options now because it happens more often than you might think!

Over on the right-hand column, you might notice I’ve rearranged some of the content boxes and added a new one called, Share the Love.

This new content box allows you to buy links on this very blog for just $5! That’s $5 for traffic, link popularity, link juice, link love, whatever you want to call it.

Only a maximum number of 10 links will be shown at any one time so when link number 11 comes in, link 1 will be bumped off the list (FIFO).

Thanks to Gary for supplying the EZ Linkz script.

In response to Paul’s question about using Affiliate Link Tracker for links from different website, I’ve put together a brief demo video showing how you can use groups to organise links in meaningful ways.

With a single installation of Affiliate Link Tracker, you could redirect all of your links and refer to them wherever you like (the redirects will, of course, only on the domain you install the script on).

The 50% offer is still good. Visit here, place an order and during the checkout enter the coupon, IMFOOL, to claim your discount.

Affiliate Link Tracker is one of my newest developments and as the name suggests, it’s a tool that affiliate marketers will find very useful as it answers that perennial question, “How can I secure affiliate links?”

If you aren’t already using redirects in order to protect your affiliate links then, well, this post isn’t here to try and convince you by selling the benefits such as:

• Easier to remember URLs.
• Friendlier looking URLs.
• Hides your raw affiliate link from those who would not let you have your deserved commission.

All I can say is that from my own experience as both an affiliate and a consumer, purposeful-looking URLs that redirect to the destination page are more effective at attracting clicks.

One of the most commonly used methods for creating redirects is to either use a HTML or JavaScript redirect that effectively load one page in order to trigger the redirect to another, but these aren’t ideal as web browsers without JavaScript enabled won’t be able to redirect to the destination URL and will instead potentially leave the user facing a blank page.

Another commonly used method of hiding affiliate links is to use a third party service such as TinyURL, but the obvious downside is that you then become dependent upon them providing that service. If anything should happen to that service then you could be left up the creek without a paddle.

Other, better methods that allow you to retain control involve setting a redirect through htaccess or using PHP to send HTML headers to the carry out the redirect. These work well for a small number of links, but because there’s no management system in place, managing a large number of links can become unwieldy. Having to upload or edit files on your server might also become a bit of a chore.

Here’s where Affiliate Link Tracker steps in to provide a better solution for creating, managing and tracking redirected links.

Affiliate Link Tracker:

• is hosted on your own domain to provide you with full control.
• It removes the need to upload files for every new redirect.
• Protects your referral income by hiding your raw affiliate links from commission thieves.
• Reports on which links are being clicked, when they’re clicked, which web pages they’re being clicked on and by whom.
• Allows you to easily find and edit existing redirects - handy if merchants change their link structure.

Here’s a short video demonstrating just how easy it is to create a new redirect and quickly change it to be a framed redirect to hide the destination URL.

Get Your Copy

Visit the Affiliate Link Tracker website to download your copy. For a short period of time, you can claim a 50% discount using the coupon code, IMFOOL.

Has your WordPress blog ever started behaving strangely for no apparent reason? Yesterday, this blog was working as it should, but this morning, the very bottom of the sidebar and footer refused to load. Also, images weren’t always displaying in Internet Explorer.

As first, I thought it might have been a problem with a third party website as I use code from the likes of YouTube, Digg, BlogTopSites and Alexa. So, I tried to localise the problem by eliminating each bit of third party code in turn, but each time, the page would still cut off part way through the side bar.

I then checked the .htaccess to see if there was anything obvious in there that might be causing the problem. There wasn’t. I then checked the server to see if there was a problem with load or with any other PHP/MySQL websites. Everything looked fine.

After checking via another PC and a local install of this template with all of the third party code in place, I decided to upload a fresh copy of the WordPress script. Lo and behold, that worked!

There’s lesson for you. If your WordPress installation starts misbehaving for no apparent reason, try re-uploading the source code and save yourself some time!