One of the critical tasks you need to do in your business backend is to set up the technology properly to do less work for yourself. Once you decide to become an affiliate, it’s essential to learn about how to redirect your affiliate links and review them regularly to ensure they are still active, still earning income, and are still relevant to your audience.
Think about having 20 different products you recommend to your ideal customer. Odds are they hosted on different platforms, all with various links and codes. Tracking can get confusing, and updating the links can become a nightmare.
The product creator may choose to change how they do things, including eliminating the sales pages or products you promote entirely. This makes it a little tricky controlling the links so that you don’t accidentally send your customers to dead links and waste the sale opportunity.
Broken Links
Broken links can make a potential customer leave your site and never come 
back. If you promote an affiliate product in multiple places they all have to be fixed. Who remembers everywhere they promoted a product? Unless you document it – hint-hint – it is unlikely you’ll find them all and it is still a royal pain to update them all individually.
For this reason, I recommend that you use a special type of technology called a redirect. Redirects work by creating a file that belongs to that one link and product so that your link for that product is easy for you to remember since it hides the look of the affiliate link with its random letters and symbols.
Let’s say you promote a product that disappears from the marketplace. As long as you have used the same redirect everywhere, you just need to make a change in one place. All references to that product are changed to what ever you want. So quick and easy.
You can redirect your affiliate links in a few ways, but the best approach is to pay for upgraded software like Prettylinks.com. That is the method I use now but I have used each of these others in the past: .htaccess file, or you can also use a PHP redirect.
Let’s look at each of these methods for creating a redirect.
Pretty Links![redirect your affiliate links]()
This software is used with self-hosted WordPress to create more attractive links from your own domain. Any link you want to create can be done. It also tracks the data you need to know to ensure that what you’re doing is working.
This is a plugin, so it’s simple to set up and use. Once you install it, just follow the instructions for creating all kinds of links from redirecting affiliate links to simply creating shorter, more attractive links right on your own website.
There is a free version that works just fine. The paid upgrade has a few more options that you might find useful.
.HTACCESS File
You’ll need to understand how to use your website hosting options within cPanel to edit your files. You can redirect single URLs utilizing the system or an entire site. You can often look to your WebHost to provide step-by-step instructions on how to do this.
PHP Redirects
This involves creating an index. PHP file. While it might seem complicated, you just need to follow the directions provided on Geeksforgeeks.org. Try it on one of your links to find out how easy it really is. You just use your text editor to create a file with one simple line of code then upload it into your files using FTP or cPanel.
Regardless of the method, there are several advantages to using redirects for your affiliate links:
- you can more easily remember the link
- the link looks more attractive
- you can easily share them with others
For example, you can’t share JVZOO links (or most other affiliate links) on Facebook, but if you share a link originating from your website that simply redirects to the sales page, you can share it in more places without concern.
Learning how to redirect your affiliate links is an easy way to lighten the task of site matainenance.
