How to make your affiliate links more user-friendly
The most effective way to refer your visitor to your affiliate product is by reviewing your personal experience with that product. It is no point to review something you haven't used before. In your review, you will absolutely put your affiliate link so that you can have commission if your reader buy that product.
What I don't like with affiliate link is, it is very long and it shows my referrer ID. I dont want that because it gives the impression to the readers that I am just trying to earn some money and the review just to lure you to buy the product.
And my solution is to change the URL to a friendly one. Below are some methods that you can use.
TinyURL (not so friendly)
With this free service, you can turn the long URL into short URL such as http://tinyurl.com/2b5mau. But the letters and numbers have no meaning.
Simple PHP redirect (more friendly)
Make a PHP file. Make sure that the file will give the users a little idea, where will it take the users to. For example, if you make a link to your Webhosting affiliate, you can name the PHP file like "recommended-webhosting.php".
After that, paste the code below in your PHP files. Replace the http://www.new-url.com with your affiliate link. Upload the files to your root server. After that you can point to the file http://yourblog.com/recommended-webhosting.php in your review post. Is it simple?
Give this trick a try and share your comments and thoughts using the comment form below.
OOoo..now i see. That’s why i got some email with http://www.tinyurl.com/bla2...
They’ve shorten the url.:D
How will this affect your ranking in Google Having php redirects with no content on your server?
@cyBer$|x: You can do this trick with email marketing too!
@saucygirl: Google only rank the pages which have contents. I dont think this will affect your Google rank. Besides it is only just a small number compared to the content of your website.
I’d rather use .htaccess file to redirect. In .htaccess:
Redirect /affiliate123 http://www.affiliate123.com/index.php?ref=12345
Then I’ll just put a link to http://www.mydomain.com/affiliate123 and it will go to the affiliate page. This is cleaner (and more efficient) in my opinion
Thanks for the info. .htaccess method is better because we don’t need to create another PHP files for every affiliate links.
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