A Useful Tool for the Affiliate Marketeer

Affiliate marketing is not a simple task of knocking up a website with a few links to various affiliate programs. If you want to be successful at it then you’re site has to look professional and be appealing to your users with interesting content. When a user lands on your page you have to sufficiently engage them long enough to seed an interest so that they will want to link to whatever program you are affiliated with. Tools that make this task easier will help you achieve your goal.

As a marketeer, you're likely to have many web pages on a variety of sites containing affiliate links to the products you are trying to sell. If you have a lot of links then managing them is crucial and one way of helping that process is to use a URL redirection service.

The biggest benefit you're going to get by using URL redirection is that by managing them within the service it means you won't have to trawl through every page on every site when ever the urls need to change. Perhaps the affiliate sponsor has changed the link you're supposed to use or you want to try out a different provider to find out what difference it makes - your web page may not look any different but its a whole lot easier to modify the url within the service itself. The results will be immediate on all your websites.

If you use alias and sub-alias features then categorising your links makes maintenance a breeze.

For example, you could use an alias [buyelectricals] to group all your electrical products. Then you could use sub-aliases [lcdtv] and [plasmatv] to specifically refer to the exact type of electrical product.

This would give you the following urls:

/buyelectricals/lcdtv
/buyelectricals/plasmatv

By using aliases in this fashion you are bringing more relevancy to your site because the links include keywords. Not only is it more readable than a great long meaningless url but it makes it more relevant for keyword searches from search engines. This will improve in better ranking of your site for keywords used in your aliases.

Additionally, relevant links help your users see the appropriateness of the link they will be clicking on, which is more likely to produce a conversion.

If you read about the experiences of successful web entrepreneurs you will see time and again that experimentation is the key to creating successful campaigns whether this is in the form of ppc marketing or the affiliate programs you actually link to. One affiliate program may be far more desirable than another and result in a higher conversion rate. You wont know however, unless you experiment. A URL redirection service is ideal for this sort of thing because you can swap in an out the target url without having to modify your web content. You might want to see the difference between several similar programs and swap them each week to see the affect on sales. The URL redirection service suddenly becomes a very useful tool.

Lastly, by using URLs in this fashion you are also hiding the often long and unsightly 'real' url; it's less obvious to your customer that you are actually an affiliate trader, which can be off-putting for some.

So why not spend time on actually marketing your site rather than worrying about all the different links you have on all your websites? It could make your richer!