Affiliate Marketing: Using Redirects To Manage Your Traffic

October 7, 2009 in Charly Leetham, Internet Marketing, Making Money by Charly Leetham

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I had an interesting discussion with my Mastermind Group the other day about using redirects to control your affiliate marketing traffic. I was relating how one of the affiliate programs I was promoting had closed down and that all of my affiliate links were disabled on the host site and when someone clicked on my link, they got a ‘dead page’. It was really frustrating.

The problem I was lamenting wasn’t that the program had closed down – I had already found something to replace it – the problem was that I had linked my raw affiliate link ‘all over the place’ and I couldn’t remember where! I was sending good quality traffic (quite likely qualified traffic) to a dead link and there wasn’t much I could do about it.

I had also spent the better part of several days going through the sites I knew about and changing my links.

If I had heeded the advice that every piece of literature on affiliate marketing had given me – I wouldn’t now be sending traffic to a dead link and I would have saved myself several hours of tedious, mindnumbing work in changing all my links….

What Was This Amazing Piece Of Advice?

The piece of advice was to ALWAYS USE A REDIRECT on your affiliate links! At first I didn’t understand what it all meant and a for a while later, it just all seemed a bit too hard.

Keep Control Of Your Traffic

You need to maintain control of your traffic. The question is how do you do it? The best way is to setup one link that you use to direct traffic to affiliate link. These are called Redirect Links and will allow you to manage your affiliate links and send them whereever you want.

There are third party services that will allow you to redirect your affiliate links, like BUDURL, Viral URL, Tiny URL however, if you have your website I strongly recommend you redirect your links through website.

By redirecting links through your website, you maintain full control of those links and cement your branding.

Link Redirects Through Your Website

Redirecting links from (or through) your website is a great way of maintaining control of your traffic and maintaining your branding.

When you use redirects through your website, these links will look like:

http://mysite.com/recommends/myfaveproduct or

http://mysite.com/myfaveproduct

and when you click on these links you are taken to another site entirely, generally an affliate link.

You can achieve a link redirect using a html file or through the .htaccess file (if you are running an Apache server). These methods are effective, but can be cumbersome to manage, put in place and require a degree of knowledge in editing html files.

Wordpress Blog Users

If you have a self hosted Wordpress Blog, there is a neater solution. The Redirection Plugin. This is a great plugin that will allow you to easily add redirects to your site and track the number of hits, using the wordpress graphical interface.

Domain Redirects

USing a domain name to redirect to an affiliate link is a popular practice. This is one of the strategies outlined in the One Week Marketing Plan and can be very effective.

When you register a domain name, many registrars provide the ability to ‘point’ the domain to another url, like your affiliate link.

Given that you can purchase .info domain for $1.99 per year, this is an excellent strategy.

The only thing that I do have some reservations with this strategy is that you can have one link per domain – which might mean you end up with a number of domain names.

You Be The Director

The thing to remember is that by directing all your third party or affiliate links through your website or through a domain redirect, you can quickly and easily change the destination.

I also recommend that you use redirect links to control your Social Network links too – that way, if you decide to exit that social network you can still connect with your followers.