Due to many browser and other downloads, affiliate links are being automatically redirected to someone else’s affiliate links in many cases. You should protect your hard work and earnings! After all, YOU are the one who puts your sweat and your money into your advertising, your site, and your promotions.
One way to solve the problem, at least for many or most of these situations, is to use a URL that redirects or masks the real affiliate URL. You can use a service such at www.tinyurl.com or others -perhaps you belong to a program that you can use to track ads with – and they change the URL for you. You should redo the links into non-recognizable links. Then the software in these downloads won’t know what changes to make to redirect the affiliate links to their own.
You can do it simply by opening up your HTML page, and then saving it as “urloldlinks.html” or some such name (you want to keep a copy of the page with affiliate links so that you won’t lose the URLs in case the redirect service goes down). Then save it back to your normal page and start working. Have your browser open to tinyurl or whichever redirect service you will be using. Then highlite and copy the URL from your page into the redirect pogram. When it gives you the new redirected URL, copy and paste it into your page of HTML.
This can become time-consuming, so plan to do a page or two every day. I have heard that some people have regained affiliate commissions by 50-100% of what it dropped to in the last few months. This confirms that in at least part of the cases, the affiliate links were redirected away. Also, use the link when you send out text ads – many people drop off the affiliate portion of the URL – and you lose sales.
You might look into this free program which has a lot of discussion and RESULTS on affiliate commissions being stolen. You can become part of a strong group fighting this theft, and just plain learn more about affiliate marketing. http://tinyurl.com/26sm
A great ad tracker and URL redirect service is part of this program: http://tinyurl.com/3h78
Now – go get your commissions back!
P. Roe does website optimization work, and is working on her sites all the time – many are in number 1-10 ranking on Google and Yahoo! Subscribe to “Wise Little Tidbits” for more optimization tips. mailto:ezineshere@aol.com?WLT http://doubleii.com/webservices.htm
