You’ve decided to promote a product and you have your handy dandy link in hand and you’re ready start telling everyone about this great product, right?

There is one thing you should definitely think about doing before you start spreading that link into the world.  What is it you ask? Start a lens? Get a blog? What???

NOPE ~ something even more simple. You need to get a redirect for your affiliate link.

I used to think this was a step it wouldn’t really matter if I skipped ~ however  ~ I am seriously rethinking that.

What is a redirect?

A redirect is a “pretty” domain that when someone goes there it actually points them to the sales page via your affiliate link. So it seems like you’re going to www.prettysite.com ~ but you are really being redirected to www.youraffiliatesalespage.com.

What are the benefits of a redirect?

1. Decrease commission theft. This is especially true when you are working with clickbank. When people click your hop link they can easily take out your affiliate id in the link and replace it with their own, thereby saving themselves some money and stealing YOUR comission.

2. More related url. People like to see the what the link they are clicking on is about. If I’m looking at a site talking about losing weight I’d much rather see www.loseweightfasttoday.com instead of www. momtohanna.melweht. hop.clickbank.net/ ~ see what I’m saying? It instills confidence that they are going somewhere related and not whisked off to some crazy porn site

3. Sometimes product owners have to make changes.  Whether someone spams the domain name their sales page is on, thereby getting the domain banned by ISPs, or maybe they decide the software they started with just doesn’t work anymore and they decide to change to another provider, or any other myriad of possibilities. These ALL change your affiliate address.

If you have used your straight affiliate url you are going to have to go out into the internet and find ALL the places you have linked to the sales page and change the link.  Good luck with that.

However,  when you have a redirect, all you have to do is go to your domain name registrar and change the place the domain is pointing to your new affiliate link.

Why is this coming up today? Because we are facing the need to make some changes to our site, which will end up changing your affilitae id. We got to thinking and believe it will be quite doable without interrupting service, but we’re just not sure about our affiliates.

We don’t want to lose you guys, we want you to continue to make your commissions, and we know that for you to be able to do that  ~ you need a redirect.

So please, not just for this program, but for any affiliate program you are in please use redirects.

A few ways you can do the redirects.

1. Purchase a .info domain name to use. These are generally very cheap ~ less than a dollar. Realize that at GoDaddy they renew at the regular price. Hopefully you will be in profit by renewal time comes around.

2. Use subdomains. If you have hosting you can create subdomains for each product. You can’t use subdomains for Ezinearticles.com, but they work great elsewhere. If you don’t have hosting you can get cheap hosting here.

3. You can create a full redirect page on your website. (you need hosting for this one too) If you’re interested in this option we can do a “how to” post.

Depending on what you need your redirects for will help you make the decision of what kind to use.  But please, understand that using some kind of redirect is really important.

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