How to Setup an Affiliate Link That Looks Normal
August 15, 2008 by admin
Ready to become a WAHM Geek?
Have you ever hovered over a banner ad or link only to shy away from clicking on it because the link looked like code written by some pimply faced hacker?
Chances are the link was a tracking link used to record where you were when you clicked. This is how affiliate programs are tracked so the right people get credit for sending traffic and paid.
Here are two examples of typical affiliate links:
https://www.e-junkie.com/ecom/gb.php?ii=68188&c=ib&aff=18667&ev=af7a1c01e8
or like this if they’re trying their best to not scare you out of clicking :
They’ll work if and when people click on them. Here’s how you can setup affiliate links that are much cleaner looking and should help your overall results:
We love the ‘Revolution theme‘ our site is built on and they offer an affiliate program to help them find new customers. So the example below shows how we created a cleaner link. We also built in room to handle new links in the future as we find products worthy of our recommending them too.
With those two goals in mind we setup our redirect link for the Revolution Theme like this:
http://www.wahmbreakcafe.com/shop/revolution
To this we went into our hosting file manager and created a new FOLDER we named ’shop’ in our base hosting FOLDER (which is almost always ‘public_html’). We opened that new FOLDER and added another FOLDER and named it ‘revolution’. These folder names are what makeup the visible URL.
Next we created a FILE (selected html as type of file) and created a single blank page in that folder and name it ‘index.htm’. Then we opened the index.htm FILE and made sure it was empty. Then we cut and pasted the following code into that page:
<html> <head><meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0;url=Your Unique Affiliate URL“> </head> <body> </body> </html>
Then we replaced the bold Your Unique Affiliate URL with the affiliate link we were given to work with. It’s always sandwiched between quotes “aff-link”
Once we finished that we entered: http://www.wahmbreakcafe.com/shop/revolutiontheme into the browser just to be sure we didn’t make a mistake. It works!
Yes, it takes about 10-15 minutes, but once it’s setup you can reuse it everywhere you want to market that program, product, or service using the easy-to-remember URL you created from scratch.
Alternative method many people prefer: If you would like your redirect link to look like this: http://www.wahmbreakcafe.com/revolution.htm
Create a FILE (single blank page) in your public_html FOLDER and
paste the following code in that page: (add your affiliate URL)
<html> <head><meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0;url=Your Unique Affiliate URL“> </head> <body> </body> </html>
WOW! This is such great information! I know I can do it, I know I can do it. Thanks, WAHM…GeekSquad has nothing on you!
Heather Allard
The Mogul Mom