Affiliate Referral Sources

Shorten Your Own Affiliate Links

Some affiliate links are so long that they wrap lines in email, usually at 65 characters. Those extra long links are also not very friendly when it comes to putting them into a web page. Never mind telling someone on the phone what the links are.

Shortening affiliate links is nothing new. It has been around for many years. There are many free services that allow you to enter your long affiliate link into a form and their software will create a shorter link for you. Those links are generally cryptic and meaningless, even though they are short enough to use just about anywhere.

What I will attempt here is to show you some ways that you can create shorter affiliate links on your own. Some methods are very easy, while others take a bit more practice to get them right. If this is all confusing to you, try Link Shrinker. It runs on your website, has a links manager to maintain all of your links and puts your affiliate links in a frame that shows only your affiliate site. Check Out Link Shrinker Here

USING CPANEL FOR REDIRECTS

If you have a website hosting account that gives you access to the cPanel control center, log in there look for the link named Redirects. It is a simple process here where you will enter the page name that you want redirected, then the complete URL, leaving off the http:// part since that is automatic.

Next choose if this will be a temporary or permanent redirect. A temporary redirect would be for situations when you are promoting a product with a link that might change in the future. An example would be if you were promoting long distance services for one company and name the redirect "longdistance", then later switch to promoting those services for another company. You would keep the same link, but change the site it will be redirected to. That way you do not have to change all of your advertisements.

The permanent redirect is used if you changed the file name of a page, moved it to another website, or are promoting services for a company with a unique product that you do not expect to change.

Once you enter your selections, click the Add button. It will then be listed on the lower part of the page in the Current Redirects section. You can remove it from that section when you are ready by selecting it from the drop-down menu and clicking the Remove button.


USING META TAGS TO REDIRECT THE PAGE

Starting off with the easiest method, either open an existing web page or create a new one. The editor you use only matters if you can see the source code of that page. If in doubt, use Windows Notepad.

At first the HTML codes may be confusing, but you are looking for a tag that looks like this: Text case does not matter. It can be upper or lower case. Look at the sample below and copy and paste the sections that are not already in your page:

<HEAD>
<TITLE>Enter your page title here </TITLE>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" content="0;URL=http://www.YOUR-AFFILIATE-URL.com">
</HEAD>

The content="0; means there will be a zero second delay when redirecting the page. If you want to display a short message to your visitor before sending them to the affiliate site, increase the number to 5 or 10 seconds, so it will be content="10; Using the longer delay will allow you to add a brief overview of the affiliate product and tell your visitors that they are being redirected.

Now change http://www.YOUR-AFFILIATE-URL.com to your affiliate link and save the file. Use a short name for the file and give it the extension .html. It should then look like this: affprogam.html

Next you will use an FTP program such as WS_FTP, CuteFTP or SmartFTP to upload that file to your website. Once it is there, type your website URL in your browser's address bar and add the new file onto the end of it like this: http://www.mysite.com/affprogram.html

You should have been redirected to your affiliate site. Using this method of redirection is a good way to track the clicks in your advertising by reviewing your traffic logs.


USING FRAMES TO REDIRECT PAGES

When you register a new domain name and redirect it to an existing site, such as for an affiliate site, or use traffic exchanges to drive traffic to your websites, frames will be used for redirecting and displaying your website. That will keep your domain name in the browser's address bar while showing your affiliate site on the page.

If you view the page source, you will see how the frames are built and the links that they point to. The sample below will put a 30 pixel frame on top that you can use for navigating, then a larger frame for the main content. An explanation follows the example.

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Enter your page title here </TITLE>
<FRAMESET rows='30,*' framespacing='0'>
<FRAME name='head' src='http://URL-TO-YOUR-TOP-FRAME-FILE' scrolling='no' noresize='1' target='main' marginwidth='0' marginheight='0'/>
<FRAME name='main' src='http://URL-TO-YOUR-MAIN-FRAME.com/page.html' marginwidth='0' marginheight='0'/>
<NOFRAMES>
<BODY>
<H1>Your Page Title</H1>
<p> Page content </p>
</BODY>
</NOFRAMES>
</FRAMESET>
</HEAD>
</HTML>

The bold section above shows how frames are put into your web page. There are several sections:

If you want the page indexed by the search engines, frames are not the best way, but can be done by making good use of the NOFRAMES section. That is the only section of a framed document that the search engines will read.


SERVER-SIDE REDIRECTS

Server-Side Redirects take place on the server before your browser knows what happened. All you see is the target site, not the one you originally linked to. This is an important difference from using META Redirection because with the META style redirection, anyone can stop the browser from going to the affiliate site, then look at the source code to see your affiliate link.

That only really matters to protect you from commission hijackers. They will replace your affiliate link with theirs, make the purchase and get the commission for the sale.

To help protect you from that happening, the server-side redirects process the redirect order before they can be hijacked. This method is a little more detailed and you can purchase a software package to do it for you, but following the steps below will get you on the right track.

There are a few things that are required to make this work:

First we will look at the end result, then explain how to get there. Your first redirect will be in a folder named webhosting. Inside that folder is a single file named .htaccess. Its contents look like this:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://secure.hostgator.com/cgi-bin/affiliates/clickthru.cgi?id=websitemanagers

Looks pretty easy right? Actually it is after you practice on a few of them. Plus it is free and flexible with the folder names you will create. Descriptive folder names are much better than the cryptic ones. Now we will dive in and see how this all gets put together.

For the steps below, we will use the example above for webhosting. Change that to the folder name that you will be promoting, along with the affiliate link inside the .htaccess file you create.

Trust me, it only looks more complicated than it really is. Experiment with a few affiliate links and you will see how easy it really is. I generally do one of these in less than 90 seconds and I do not type 100+ words per minute.

Once you get the feel for the process, you will be glad that you saved your money. However, if all of this still confuses you, try this great new product that will allow you to manage your affiliate links all from a web page. Check Out Link Shrinker Here.





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