Keeping Affiliate Links Organized

I think it’s important to keep affiliate links organized, which I learned the hard way, in terms of lost time switching links and lost commissions by losing control of my links. I’ve devised a way to keep them organized which simplifies things a lot so I thought I’d share it.

As you can probably agree, affiliate links are super important. They contain the tracking information that allows you to get paid when a conversion happens after someone clicks your link.

Well, there are several ways to keep them organized but I recently switched to a way that doesn’t rely on a 3rd party tool or website…

OK, I don’t know if you have ever had to change your linking scheme for an affiliate program ever, but it’s such a pain, especially when you have a ton of links promoting different products.. First of all, if you have to change the link for just one product, and you have promoted it in more than one place, there really is only need to change it one time. This is the very basic organizational skill to have and most of you are probably aware of it. I use a redirect file on my server and just point to that any time I want to promote that particular product or offer.

So say I was promoting raw foods and the particular product I was promoting was kale chips. I might create a redirect file using php and store it in a common folder, perhaps called “go”.

So you might have a path like this “/go/kale_chips.php”. You would then use some redirect code in that file and redirect to your affiliate link. Now any time you talk about kale chips and link to it, just link to that file. You may want to even just use an HTML redirect so that you aren’t dependent on PHP, but I think it’s safe to assume, at least for me, that PHP will be my scripting language of choice for a very long time.

OK.. here’s another scenario.. you promote products from multiple online raw food stores. Say one of them changes their linking scheme because they changed affiliate software (it does happen)… now what? You have to root around in the go folder trying to find products for that particular store, then change all of the links. Well, you can’t avoid changing the links but if you created a subfolder for each store, it would have been even simpler. So, here’s an example path “/go/1/kale_chips.php”. Instead of “1″ you can use the name of the store, but I don’t do that anymore myself. The thing is, Store 1 could go out of business, or you could get a better commission at another store so you might want to redirect those links elsewhere. So, what I do now is create a spreadsheet to keep track of the names of the stores. So “1″ might be “Raw Store Express” or whatever… that way I’m not tied to “Raw Store Express” and can seamlessly switch stores without making a mess of things, all the while making it easy to switch affiliate links if necessary.

This happens more often with CPA offers where one offer is no longer available and you need to redirect to another one. This scenarios sucks if you aren’t using a redirect file as you can imagine because you have to hunt down all of the places you used the link… which could be on external sites, in PDF’s, wherever. So, I hope that you at least have a redirect file in use so there is only one change to be made. Now, say you are promoting acai offers, I might just use paths like “/go/acai1.php” and “/go/acai2.php” and then specify in the spreadsheet what offer each one is for, that way I can redirect where I want if the offer is pulled or I find one with a better commission. In your spreadsheet you’ll probably want to specify the affiliate network and the payout so you can see at a glance what affiliate redirect links do what. Try to avoid using names like “acaiburn.php” because Acai Burn might not be available anymore at some point, and suddenly you are promoting Acai Plus or something. Sometimes the affiliate network will redirect to an offer on your behalf, but not always. Plus it might not be an offer you want anyways. Stay in control and keep track of your links.

Another scenario, rare, but has happened to me recently… OK, I built an acai berry blog when Acai was all the rage after the word “acai” first left Oprah’s lips lol… well, I built it with the intention of selling it, but I monetized it using my links and offered instructions for easily swapping out the affiliate links and AdSense code. Well, the new owner made one modification and that was just a small link to his site for SEO purposes. He left my affiliate links and AdSense in tact. This happens a lot as I realized after selling a bunch of sites.. So anyway, at one point, the blog was generating lead after lead for the acai offer. It was great. Plus I was making a few bucks from AdSense each day. Then suddenly the Acai earnings stopped and the AdSense earnings went up (still on the rise). Well I investigated and realized that my redirect was still in place on the site but the network pulled the offer and didn’t redirect it to a new one. I contacted the network and they said that they were in fact redirecting it, but they weren’t as I eventually proved to them. Then they said that there is nothing that can be done! That’s what I mean by staying in control of my links. That link still gets clicked like crazy but it goes nowhere! How to prevent that from happening again? Simple, store your redirects on a different domain. I have a domain dedicated to using Propser202 tracking software, so I’m starting to store my redirects there in the rare event I sell a site again and the same thing happens. Plus, it keeps things very organized.

Well.. hope that all makes sense and you don’t make the same mistakes that I have in the past. It might seem like a bit of extra work initially but it keeps you in control of those very important links and prevents you from being married to any particular service, network, store, etc. I’m losing commissions DAILY because I was lazy about it in the past, plus I really didn’t know any better.