How & Why to Redirect Your Affiliate Links

If you want to keep better track of your links, have more control over necessary changes to your links, and possibly even have more clicks on your affiliate links, you should be redirecting your affiliate links.

This means where your affiliate link may look like: http://affiliateID.hop.clickbank.net
You can change it to a link coming from your own website like:
http://www.yourdomain.com/link.html

There are a number of reasons to redirect your link and here are a few:

1. Many affiliate links are long and they can actually break into 2 lines if you're sending them in an email. Once they break up like that, your readers won't be able to click through.

2. Sometimes affiliate programs change their links or even shut down. Our programs are going to be here for a long time, but always be safe with your affiliate links as a matter of practice and redirect them. That means if you ever need to make changes to your link, you can simply make the change from your redirected link, instead of trying to find where you placed all those links on your website and in your emails.

3. If a link is showing as coming from your website, your readers might be more likely to click on it than if they see a long strange affiliate link direct from the program. You can even name your file something creative or descriptive (ex. mydomain.com/must-have-toy.html) and your readers might be more likely to click through.

4. If you redirect your links the way I have describe in this article, you'll be able to log into your website statistics and track click throughs for your links. The affiliate program you are involved with may already provide some of these statistics, but you can track multiple links and get all your data from one place.

5. It makes it easy to remember your affiliate links for promotions on the fly. Whenever you want to recommend products, you're more apt to remember your link.

How to make your redirected link:

There are a variety of methods to redirect a link, but we're going to keep it simple and use what is called a javascript redirect.

1. Create a new blank page for your website. Name the page whatever you'd like (for example: yourlatestproduct.html).

2. Remove any HTML code and paste the following HTML codes instead:

3. Be sure to replace http://www.INSERTAFFILIATELINK.com with your full affiliate link.

4. Test your link to make sure everything is working. Simply type in the location of your new page into your web browser to ensure it is redirecting (example: type in yourdomain.com/link.html).

Now you have redirected your affiliate link!