A redirect is when you visit a particular page or website and it automatically forwards you to a different address. In this lesson we show you how make your affiliate links safer and friendlier by investigating how to hide your affiliate link with redirects.
Instead of putting your (rather unfriendly) affiliate link into a page, you can create another page on your site that automatically redirects to your affiliate link. Then when you want to send people through your affiliate link, you can provide them with the (much friendlier) address of your redirect page on your website. This means that you can put this address inside emails/newsletters and it will look much more attractive to your readers. For example:
http://example123.rspanish.hop.clickbank.net/
could become
http://example.com/recommends/rocketspanish/
Instead of trying to send people to your ugly affiliate link (http://example123.rspanish.hop.clickbank.net/), you can instead send them to the non-intimidating http://example.com/recommends/rocketspanish/ address. This page automatically redirects to your ugly affiliate link anyway, but your visitors never have to look at it.
Redirects are also a useful way of "cloaking" your affiliate link so that other people don't see it and think, "hmm... I could click on this affiliate link, or I could join the program and click through my link instead and get the commission myself!" Redirects make your affiliate link less obvious to other affiliates.
By diligently setting up redirects for all your affiliate links, you're safe if the merchant ever changes their affiliate network or affiliate link system. You'll just need to change the link in one place, instead of going through all your web pages and newsletters to change the links. If you set up redirects for ALL products, not just affiliate products, you'll also be able to easily add an affiliate link if an affiliate program ever becomes available for that product. Handy!
The easiest way to do this by far is with AffiloTheme. If you don't have AffiloTheme, you'd need to get it on your website in order to create your affiliate redirects this way.
Basically, you just go to the Affiliate Redirects option in the AffiloTheme menu in WordPress.
Then click "Add redirect".
Then, enter the name for the end of your link. So if you wanted the link to be www.yoursite.com/go/rocketspanish then you'd enter "rocketspanish". Remember to type it exactly as you want it to appear in the link. Then you enter your affiliate link below that and save your redirect.
Then you can put "www.yoursite.com/go/rocketspanish" all throughout your website and newsletters, but anyone clicking on that link will be automatically redirected to go to the merchant through your affiliate link.
Basically it does the same job as the ugly affiliate link, but looks much more tidy and trustworthy.
The easiest way to do it is to simply paste the following snippet of code into a blank web page, and change it to point to the page you want to redirect to (which will usually be your affiliate link).
<?php
header( 'Location: http://www.youraffiliatelink.goes.here.com' ) ;
?>
IMPORTANT: This code needs to go directly into your HTML in source view, and it must go into a completely blank page: There shouldn't be anything else on the page, not even <html> </html> tags. You also need to save the page as a .php file.
Another method you might see is the meta refresh. It looks like this:
<meta HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH" content="0; url=http://www.youraffiliatelink.goes.here.com">
In this piece of code, the URL is the address you want to redirect to, and the "content="0; refers to the number of seconds the page should wait before redirecting. In this example, "0" means the page will redirect instantly.
This method is slower than the PHP method, but it allows you to add a message to the page if you want. Redirect pages traditionally have a "if this page doesn't redirect in 5 seconds, click here" message to be nice to older browsers. These days it's not really necessary, (and not really desirable for affiliates) - you're better off sticking with the faster PHP method.
In this lesson we've taken a look at some reasons for using affiliate link redirects, including:
We also looked at two ways you can create affiliate link redirects, including:
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Questions & Comments + Add a comment
Once can also think about using CNAME.
It comes littered with a bunch of "don't use this, it doesn't work!" warnings, which makes it look at bit unreliable, but I haven't had any problems. You could also try any number of other redirection plugins in the WordPress plugins directory: https://wordpress.org/plugins/search.php?q=redirect
How can I get a php redirect as used by savemoneyindia.com?
The put so many links and i am sure there would be some easy way out. Also they don't put there affiliate link, but the simple product url and it gets affliated automatically.
Pls help !
I don't really know what you're asking. What sort of behaviour are you wanting for your site? (Eg, "I add an affiliate link to my website and it is automatically turned into a nice redirect so that it doesn't look like an affiliate link"?)
That site you refer to looks quite large, and probably has some fancy system going on in the background that would require a programmer to create. It's probably a little bit beyond the scope of this lesson.
does affiliate links goes to products links or to the merchants website?
Regards!
I believe that depends on the affiliate program. Some are set up different ways. But affiliate tracking works with codes in the URL and cookies.
This question seems to be very important to me.
A
There are other reasons why this is important, too: if your page isn't indexed whenever it's updated, you might miss out. Google can't tell if you've improved your keywords, provided more relevant content for those keywords, or even just fixed some of the technical on-page SEO issues. So you want to get your site indexed when you make changes to it... and link cloaking can prevent that, so it can be a very bad thing.