Danger Brown » affiliate links http://dangerbrown.com Your best friend in affiliate marketing. Wed, 08 Sep 2010 15:53:40 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 How and why to redirect your affiliate links http://dangerbrown.com/how-and-why-to-redirect-your-affiliate-links/ http://dangerbrown.com/how-and-why-to-redirect-your-affiliate-links/#comments Sun, 10 May 2009 06:39:23 +0000 dangerbrown http://dangerbrown.com/?p=49 Why to run your affiliate links through a redirect:
1. You can place tracking code on it and know how often it’s clicked on. You can see if this number matches what your affiliate network is showing.
2. If you have many links to your offer on your landing page, and the offer gets pulled, or you want to test other offers with the same landing page you only have to change the link once (on your redirect).
3. It can help to hide the affiliate link from your visitors.

How to make a redirect:
There are many ways to make a redirect. The meta-refresh is about the most reliable/easiest redirect to implement. Here is the easy way you should probably do it:

1. Build a page for your website and name it something like “link-to-offer.htm” with a title like “Visit the (affiliate offer) site!”

2. Go to the html view for the page and replace everything there with this:
<html>
<head>
<title>Visit the (offer) website</title>
<meta http-equiv=”REFRESH” content=”0;url=http://www.youraffiliatelinkgoeshere.com“></HEAD>
<BODY>
(delete this and paste your Google analytics or whatever tracking code here. You can also put readable text here, but don’t. The next line is optional and only needed if your redirect fails. Delete it or replace the link between the quotes with your own.)
<p>Please follow <a href=http://www.youraffiliatelink.com>link</a>!</p>
</BODY>
</HTML>
3. Link to this page anywhere you would normally place an affiliate link.
4. The parts in red need to be either deleted or changed.
5. Save this page in your favorites if you expect to do this more than once.

Where it says content=”0 the number 0 instructs the browser to redirect after 0 seconds. If you wanted to display a message, you could change the number to say 5 which would display the page for 5 seconds and you could place text or an image or whatever in the body of the html. If you do this, and people hit the back button, they will be re-redirected, but if you leave it at 0 and they hit the back button, they will come back to your website. The redirect will not be kept in browser history. The meta-refresh must stay in the “head” section of the html file if you decide to change things around. The link in the body might be a good idea if you are worried someone’s browser won’t support the metarefresh. I leave it out of mine, because I want a white screen. Lots of folks won’t even realize they’ve been redirected. I prefer to keep it that way.

A meta-refresh, isn’t perfect, and some would say java is better, but not all browsers will have java enabled. Remember “K.I.S.S.” Keep It Simple Stupid.

Here are a couple other types of redirects:

Java:
<script type=”text/javascript”>
location.replace(‘http://youraffiliatelink.com’);
</script>
(Using location.replace removes the redirect from the browser history,
 allowing the back button to work.)
Http refresh:
HTTP/1.1 200 ok
Refresh: 0; url=http://www.youraffiliatelink.com
Content-type: text/html
Content-length: 78
Please follow <a href="http://www.youraffiliatelink.com/">link</a>!
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