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!

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.

If you haven’t yet gotten control of your affiliate links then you’re leaving yourself open to lost time, money and opportunity.

If you’re using the likes of TinyURL to cloak your affiliate links then your income from those links is genuinely in the hands of a third party whom you have no control. If they decide to shut up shop or start charging for their service then you can either pay up or go back, change every instance of those links and that’s a tough thing to do when they’re in a PDF on someone’s computer.

Perhaps you’re already using redirects. That’s good, but are you tracking how they’re used? Do you know which of your links attracts the most clicks? Do you know if your affiliate links work best in certain emails or in certain positions on your web page layout?

The point I’m getting at is that I’m looking for beta testers for a new tool I’ve developed, which will allow you to become a much more effective and profitable affiliate. Participants in the beta test will receive a time-limited version of the product to install and test. Active participants will get free lifetime licenses.

Requirements are:

• You must have a website with PHP and MySQL available
• You agree to provide me with some constructive feedback! Seems obvious, but too many people sign up for testing and don’t feed back.

If you’re interested in taking part and getting something that could increase your affiliate income for free then get in touch.

No more volunteer beta testers, thanks, but if you’re thinking about a publishing a review or offering a special deal for your mailing list then get in touch.

Text Link Ads have quietly switched from using TinyURLs as affiliate links with a JavaScript-based solution that obfuscates your raw affiliate URLs. I say quietly because I’ve not yet received any communication about it from Text Link Ads informing me about the changeover, but they’re right there in the TLA control panel as graphical banners, text links and RSS buttons.

To an affiliate, obfuscation can be a useful tool as it disguises raw affiliate links and prevents hijacking (when people remove or replace your referral ID before making a purchase meaning you don’t get any credit for the sale), but this particular implementation seems pointless as the raw affiliate URL is displayed in plain text in the web browser’s status bar when you hover over one of these new links.

Up until a few days ago, your TLA affiliate links were presented to you as TinyURLs. Now, logging into your Text Link Ads affiliate section, you’ll be presented with a variety of different options for where your affiliate links actually lead to. Choices include the TLA home page, $100 promotion page or the package details page of one of your own inventory websites.

Whilst this might seem like an improvement, the format of the links restrict them to being displayed in web pages only. I can’t figure out why an option for a plain text link allowing the affiliate some modicum of control has been omitted. This new JavaScript-based system isn’t email friendly, has to be displayed on a web page, doesn’t prevent hijacking and obviously isn’t going to work very well in a non-JavaScript environment.

Here’s the code for a typical, new-styled TLA affiliate link:

<script type="text/javascript">
function affiliateLink(str){ str = unescape(str); var r = '';
for(var i = 0; i < str.length; i++) r +=
String.fromCharCode(7^str.charCodeAt(i));document.write(r);}
affiliateLink('%3Bf%27ouba%3A%25ossw%3D%28%28ppp%29sb%7Fs*
knil*fct%29dhj%28tsfusbuXlns%29wow8uba%3A40127%259%23677%27
ni%27AUBB%27Knilt%3B%28f9');
</script>

I would have used one of my new TLA affiliate links in this post, but they don’t appear to display properly in WordPress either however, I did manage to extract the link by right-clicking on the above when it’s displayed in a browser and copying the link.

If you fancy $100 of free text link advertising, give Text Link Ads a try.

If you had to update all of your old style TLA links on your WordPress blog to the TinyURL format using SQL then it’s time to start controlling your own links with your own redirects rather than relying on third party services.

Technorati Tags: Text Link Ads, TLA, Affiliate Marketing