Here’s a familiar scenario: You have a blog, and scattered throughout several hundred blog posts, you’ve made reference to books you’re reading, linking to them with your Amazon affiliate link. Suddenly, Amazon drops your state from its affiliate program. Now you have to spend hours reviewing every single blog post just to change those links to a new affiliate program.
If you had all your links redirected, they would all be in one place, making mass changes like this much easier.
Here’s an even worse situation, though, and one that’s not recoverable: You’ve distributed a viral eBook promoting a few high-converting affiliate programs. Thousands of people have downloaded your eBook and are actively buying through your links, when you receive an email announcing a change in affiliate tracking. In 30 days, your links will need to be replaced with a new format, or they will stop working.
If you had set up redirects, you would be able to fix this easily. As it is, there is nothing you can do. Anyone with an old version of your ebook will be clicking on broken links, costing you sales and making you look somewhat less than professional.
The good news: even for the non-techy, creating redirects is easy.
Automated Methods
Use your theme’s built-in tools. Most premium themes (like Genesis and Thesis) provide an easy way to create redirects. Simply make a page or a post as normal, then below the post editor, fill in your affiliate link in the field that says “301 Redirect.” Give the page a title, click publish, and you’re done. Whenever someone visits that URL, they’ll be automagically sent to the link you entered in the redirect field.
Use a WordPress plugin. There are several free and premium plugins that will help you create redirects as well. Some, like Pretty Link Pro and MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate offer advanced tracking statistics to help you discover which promotions produce the best results.
URL shortening services. Think Bit.ly, Ow.ly, and tinyurl.com. These services are simple and quick to use, making them great for or Tweets and Facebook updates, but their transient nature makes them a bad choice for permanent link placements.
GoTryThis.com. This is the ultimate in link-shortening and tracking. For a monthly fee, GoTryThis.com will allow you to shorten links for an unlimited number of domains, organize your links by category and campaign, and has sophisticated tracking reports. If you have a lot going on in your business and enjoy stats, this is the one for you.
Manual Methods
META refresh redirect. This is done using a simple HTML page containing the following code:
The number following “content=” represents the number of seconds you want to browser to wait before sending your visitor off to the next page. For affiliate links, you probably want to leave it set to 0.
PHP redirects. This is a similar method, but using php code instead of HTML. The code you will use is this:
Javascript redirects. Again, a similar method using the following code between the body tags on an HTML page:
The 300 after the link is short delay designed to allow time for any tracking script to fire before the page redirects. This is the only one I am aware of that will allow you to accurately track clicks using Google tracking code.
NOTE: This method will fail if your reader has javascript turned off in their browser, as some people do for security reasons.
To use any of these methods, paste the code in your favorite text editor and save the file as index.html or index.php (depending on which one you chose). Fire up your FTP client and upload the file to your server inside an appropriately named directory. So if your affiliate link is for AllQualityPLR.com, you might name your directory aqplr. That makes your redirect link http://yoursite.com/aqplr.
What I Use
I’ve tried them all, looking for the easiest, most reliable method, but I always seem to come back to the rather old-fashioned index.html file with a javascript redirect. I like to have the ability to track clicks all in one place (Google Analytics) and I don’t like to entrust critical business functions to third parties like Pretty Link or GoTryThis. Also, I don’t like my WordPress pages and posts listings to be cluttered up with empty files containing only a redirect.
Are you diligent about creating redirects? What method do you use and why? Share your thoughts in the comments.
PS – I was just talking to a client and she’s in the process of going through hundreds of Aweber emails to track down some affiliate links that have changed. It turns out Aweber does not have a find and replace (or even a search) feature for autoresponders. If she’d set all her links as recdirects this would be an easy job. As it is, it will take hours. So there you go – one more reason to redirect everything.
If something is worth promoting, I think it’s worth setting up a redirect
It’s a rare situation where I don’t set one up.
I do mine the old fashioned way too. More steps but less worry that something will bork down the road.
Good point about something being worth promoting, Kelly! And I agree about having control over your redirects. What if that third-party app goes belly-up? Or I want to stop shelling out every month for a paid service? Much better to have this stuff under MY control, I think.
If you’re an affilitate marketer and want to promote your product or the product you are trying to sell, redirect is a must cause it will save you time and energy if say Amazon every drops its affiliate link.
I use Pretty Link Pro and it works fine for me. I think that Pretty Link Pro does the job, its free, and has tracking so its a great plugin for everyone to have.
Hi Caleb, and thanks for the comment.
I’ve heard good things about Pretty Link Pro. My only reservation is that you’re still giving control to a third-party. What happens if they stop development?
That can be said about a lot of things, but if that happens I would just right a script to change them all. Also Pretty Link Pro is a pretty big plugin so I would be surprised that happens anytime in the near future.