Using Redirects to Boost Your Affiliate Sales

A simple change that hides your affiliate ID from prying eyes and makes clicking on your affiliate links more attractive to buyers

Affiliate links are ugly. There's no getting around it.

And many potential buyers are turned off by them. Some of them go so far as to refuse to click a link when they see that long glop of affiliate alphabet soup appear in the status bar when they place their cursor over that link.

And then there's that other problem with exposed affiliate links, too -- the nefarious types who use various techniques to replace your affiliate ID with theirs whenever they buy something.

A clean alternative to affiliate links

But there are ways to clean up your affiliate URLs so your visitors never even see them. I personally use affiliate redirects on all of my affiliate links.

Using redirects

The method I use involves creating redirects in my .htaccess file. Now, I'll admit, it took me a while to overcome my procrastination and set up my redirects. I'm not someone who normally feels comfortable tinkering with all those those oddly named files on my server. But I was kicking myself once I set up my redirects and saw how easy it was.

You'll likely find your .htaccess file in the root directory of your server. That's the same place you upload your home page to, so it should be easy to find out if your hosting service has provided a blank one for you.

If they haven't, you can download the sample .htaccess file I've prepared for you. You can download it from the following box:

http://www.OneStopWebSupport.com/articles-web/affiliate-redirects.htm

I've included two sample redirects in this file, including a redirect that will take visitors to the home page of a home decor site, MasterVisions Etched Glass Home Decor, once you insert your MasterVisions affiliate ID in place of the Xs. (If you'd like to apply as a MasterVisions affiliate, you can go to the following page and scroll down to the "reseller or affiliate" link near the bottom of the page.

http://www.OneStopWebSupport.com/mastervisions

The other one is a product that just about anyone can promote to people potentially starting a business on the web (which, nowadays, is just about everyone). You can delete these redirects as you set up your own. Or you can apply as an affiliate and promote them from your site. (If you'd like to apply, you can go to the following page and click on the Affiliate icon in the upper right corner of the page)

http://www.OneStopWebSupport.com/sitesell

You've now seen two of the redirects I use. Much nicer than the long, ugly URLs that most affiliate links have, isn't it. You wouldn't realize it wasn't a page on my own site, but it takes you directly to the affiliate site.

How to set up a redirect

The way you convert your affiliate links to look like the one I showed you above is as follows.

1. Download your .htaccess file either from your server or from this page above.
2. Type the word "redirect" (without the quotation marks) at the beginning of a line.
3. Leave a space and then type a forward slash and the abbreviation you want to use for the company or product. Make sure you do not use the name of an existing directory or file.
4. Leave another space and then type the affiliate URL you want them redirected to.
5. Save the file when you're done and upload it to the root directory of your server.

The results, for me, look like this:

redirect /sitesell http://sitesell.com/onestopw.html

When someone clicks on the link that directs them to www.YOURSITENAME.com/sitesell (or www.YOURSITENAME.com/mastervisions), their browser looks for the address in the link. Since that address doesn't exist, it goes to the .htaccess file for further instructions. The .htaccess file then redirects them to the affiliate URL that you designated for that nonexistant address.

Other benefits of redirects

Redirects are also handy when you have a large number of links throughout your site pointing to a single affiliate page. If anything should happen to change the affiliate URL for that page (such as the affiliate having to change to a more robust affiliate software as MasterVisions unfortunately had to do several years ago), you only need to change the affiliate URL in the .htaccess file instead of searching down every page on your site that links to it.

And redirects can help you if you ever need to change any file names for your pages without having all the search engine traffic that comes to that page suddenly lead to a 404 error page. Simply do with the old page name what you did with the affiliate abbreviation above. Your .htaccess file will redirect your search engine traffic to the new page without any loss of visitors.

While the idea of working with your .htaccess file can seem intimidating to the non-technically inclined initially, it's really an easy process that puts a new face on all those ugly old affiliate links and can gain you extra sales.

Helping you become the successful business owner you want to be.

LIKE THIS PAGE? ADD TO YOUR SOCIAL BOOKMARKS:BlinkDel.icio.usDigg
FurlGoogleSimpySpurl Technorati Y! MyWeb