Affiliate Secret #3: Using A Redirect Link

Welcome to the 3rd part in my affiliate secrets email guide. In this email, I am going to discuss cloaking and redirecting affiliate links and what are the benefits of redirecting your links.

So here are the two main reasons why we cloak our links…

1. The general public doesn’t like to click on links that look like affiliate links, and I think this is more if the case that they don’t trust the look of them. To be honest I can see why as they aren’t very good-looking links, and I wouldn’t probably click them myself. Something else to consider is that people really don’t like the idea that you might make some money off them, and it’s the case where we simply don’t like the idea that we have been sold.

2. Other affiliates do some seriously aggressive marketing tactics and some of the methods they use are not always ethical when they are promoting a hot affiliate product. These methods often result in complaints, and email service providers can block and blacklist the affiliate product’s domain. Sometimes it can only be temporarily, but if it’s not your promotional emails won’t get delivered, and fundamentally; you won’t be making any money.

So you need to use a url that you control and the best way to do that is by using a simple redirect, which will then make it look like the link they are clicking is going to your site, which, in essence, it is, but it’s then going to instantly redirect to the affiliate offer.

As you are using your own domain in your promotional campaigns, your readers will start to see your domain, and this is where branding comes into play.

One of the biggest advantages of using redirects with your domain is that you have complete control over where the link redirects to. The fantastic thing about this is if you need to change affiliate programs after you have posted links out you can do it very easily, and I will show you this on my blog.

Imagine if you were using the affiliate programs’ URL in your promotional materials such as emails, adverts, adwords, classifieds, articles, etc. You will have a really hard time changing all the links to point to the new program that you are recommending.

In fact, for some of the promotional channels that you use, it will be impossible to change it once you have promoted it. Which means you will be losing affiliate commissions or even doing damage to your name if that affiliate product goes bad.

Below you can see a quick video on creating a redirect link…

Here is the code that you need to create the redirect

<?php
header( ‘location: http://wxw.youraffiliatecodeurl.com’ ) ;
?>

Then all you need to do is put that code in file on your host in a folder called recommends or similiar and test it and then your onto a win :-)

This is what has worked for me and I am still using it right to this day :-)

I hope you have enjoyed this Affiliate secret.

All the best