Redirect Affiliate Program Links for Maximum Effectiveness
By: Power Satellite Affiliate
If you promote an affiliate program and are not redirecting your
affiliate links, you may be missing out on traffic and commissions
opportunities. Redirecting your affiliate program links helps to
minimize spam filtering of your email campaigns, increase the
acceptance of article submissions, build backlinks to your site,
and reduce "click fear".
Minimize Spam Filtering
If you are promoting an affiliate program through email, other
(unscrupulous) affiliates of the same company may be indirectly
hurting the delivery rate of your messages. Email filters will
block messages that contain content or links associated with spam.
Even if you send your message only to subscribers who have double
opted-in to your list, your messages may still be blocked if it
contains a URL used by spammers.
Search Engine Optimization
Most affiliate program URLs look something like
http://www.example.com/?id=123. Unfortunately, most search engines
have limited or no ability to read these links.
Google(TM) warns, "If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the
URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search
engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It
helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few."
Google goes on to tell us "Don't use "&id=" as a parameter in
your URLs, as we don't include these pages in our index."
Furthermore, if you are publishing your affiliate link on other
sites such as blogs, forums, etc., you are missing out on the
opportunity to build valuable backlinks that could increase your
search engine rankings.
Article Submissions
Submitting articles to web publishers and article directories is a
powerful way to build backlinks to your site. Unfortunately, many
publishers and directories do not accept articles that include
affiliate links. However, virtually all will accept links to your
own site. By replacing your affiliate link with a link to your own
site, even one that redirects to your affiliate link, you will
increase the number of article submissions accepted by publishers
and directories.
Reduce "Click Fear"
Thanks to those few sites on the Web that distribute adware,
spyware, viruses, etc., many web users are fearful of clicking on
links, especially those that look "suspicious". To the average user
who has no special knowledge of the internal workings of the Web, a
link that has "unusual" characters such as those in dynamic URLs
(e.g. http://www.example.com/?id=123⊂=456) will appear less
trustworthy than a static link.
How to Redirect Your Affiliate Program URL
There are several ways to redirect your affiliate program links.
The most "search engine friendly" method is the 301 Permanent
redirect with the .htaccess file. You can use this method if your
site is hosted on an Apache (Linux, Unix) based server.
To create a permanent redirect, open (or create) the .htaccess
file. On a single line add the following code to the file:
redirect 301 /example.html
http://www.example.com/?id=123⊂=456
This code tells the server to redirect
"http://www.yoursite.com/example.html" to your affiliate link
"http://www.example.com/?id=123⊂=456".
Other methods of redirecting include using PHP's header() function
and HTML's meta refresh.
No matter what affiliate program you're promoting, you will benefit
by redirecting your links. Redirecting your affiliate links can
improve the delivery rate of your email campaigns as well as
increase CTR. Your articles may be more readily accepted by article
directories and web publishers. Furthermore, redirecting replaces
links to your merchant with valuable backlinks to your own
site.
David Meindl offers tips for Dish Network affiliates. He is also the publisher of a Dish Network affiliate program directory.
Article Source: http://www.articledashboard.com