If you are using regular affiliate links to promote an affiliate program, chances are you are missing out on traffic and commissions. You might want to use redirection links instead.
Here’s how a direct affiliate link and a redirection link look like:
Direct affiliate link: http://www.example.com?id=123 (where 123 is your affiliate ID)
Redirection link: http://www.yoursite.com/product.html
Notice that the redirection link appears to be like a regular static page on your site.
Why use redirection links in place of direct affiliate links?
- Increase email delivery rate – Avoid or minimize the risk of your affiliate link being blacklisted by email filters because of other spammy affiliates promoting the same affiliate program. Also, redirection links are typically shorter and therefore preventing the URL of being broken up into more than one line (thus resulting in a broken link) in the email message.
- Search engine optimization – Search engines generally favor crawling “static” URLs rather than dynamic ones (typical of affiliate links). But some might argue that both static pages and dynamic pages get near-similar treatment by search engines of today.
- Increase article submission acceptance – Some web publishers and article repositories might not accept articles with affiliate links. However, using redirection, the links appear to go to your own site and not the site running the affiliate program. You’ll also get the indirect benefit of having more backlinks to your own site, thus enabling your site to be ranked higher by search engines.
- Reduce click-fear syndrome – Typical affiliate links will have “special characters” such as “?” and “&”. To some users, these links appear unusual to them and appear less trustworthy and therefore these users will not click on the links.
- Minimize missed affiliate commission opportunities – There are some smart Alecs who copy your affiliate link URL and manually remove your affiliate ID before going to the product page that you are promoting. Yes, these people do not want you to earn affiliate commissions!
There you go. I’ll write on how to create redirection links for your direct affiliate links in the coming future.
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