Learn Blogging & Affiliate Marketing with Rosalind Gardner
Amazon has just made it SO much simpler to get your affiliate links from them.
With their new Site Stripe, you just navigate to the page of a product that you want to promote, click the ‘Link to this Page' link in the Site Stripe bar (as shown in the graphic below), login (if you haven't done so already) and voila! you're at the Customize and Get HTML page.
I wrote a review about the Project Black Mask. Although I summarily denounced the basic tactics espoused by its authors, I commended the work on its keyword research and generation section.
Although most of the comments posted about my review were supportive, I got an earful from a few who took great exception to the fact that I linked to Project Black Mask with my affiliate link.
Ooops! I did it again!
Some suggested that despite my warnings, readers may have be persuaded by the sales letter to buy the product for the wrong reasons – and that I was wrong to facilitate their purchase through my link.
Another – apparently without access to Dictionary.com – accused me of ‘profiteering' which is defined as ‘To make excessive profits on goods in short supply.'
Ya right.
Trust me on this – I turned far more people away from that product and saved my visitors considerably more money than I earned from that review.
THAT was my intention.
As to affiliate linking… here's what I think about that… [Read more…]
Cheese me. I was in the Linkshare interface the other night getting Allzine links for blog posting about on the Roamsters.com site. Thirty magazines were returned in the Travel & Leisure category. I grabbed about ten of them, creating ten draft posts with magazine pictures and titles and planned to write descriptions of them later.
Well, good thing I clicked on some of those links. More than half of them no longer exist in Allzine's product database. Really, when I searched the Travel & Leisure category within Allzines itself, only 9 magazines were returned, meaning that 21 TWENTY-ONE!!!! of the Linkshare links were no good.
Of the nine that WERE good, some of them had broken graphics.
Lesson to affiliates: Check the merchant's site first to see whether or not the product is still offered. It's a hassle, I know, but better than wasting your time putting up product links that don't work and thereby frustrating your visitors.
Suggestion to merchants: Kindly make sure your product links are up to date!
In response to one of my posts, David Lovelace sent me the following note:
Dear Rosalind, Do you have 2 minutes to confirm something for me? I just looked over your post and saw something that I had never heard or thought about before. I use (a specific product) to make sure my affiliates' links are cloaked throughout the process. But I've been thinking of opening a CB account without the script. So when you said:
1. He should do the quick fix to prevent his affiliates' ID's from showing in the address bar which consists of creating a page that redirects to ‘http://www.wahumorway.com/index.html'. 2. That redirect page gets listed as his sales page in the Clickbank interface.
… a light came on. Great tip for those not using a 3rd party affiliate script. I would never thought to do it that way. Let me run this by you to make sure I understand this. Could you confirm if this is correct? I use re-directs all the time when promoting affiliate products, so I understand that (and the code used). I have used both .php and .html code to do this.
In your experience, does one cloak better than the other? Which do you use? If I'm translating your tip correctly..
I'll create a re-direct page (ie, www.myproduct.com/sales.html) making sure that it directs to www.myproduct.com Then put www.myproduct.com/sales.html as the home page inside the CB admin. Then when anyone clicks on a CB generated link, the re-direct process will cloak the affiliate ID so that only www.myproduct.com only appears in the browser?
I appreciate your time in confirming this.
Dave Lovelace
Hey Dave!
You got it exactly right, and thanks for spelling it out! 🙂
I created a redirect to the home page from the URL superaffiliatehandbook.com/cb/and placed it in my .htaccess file.
Then that URL is listed as the “Hoplink target URL” in my Clickbank account.
The same thing happens when someone clicks on one of my affiliate's CB links for the Super Affiliate Handbook. The visitor doesn't see the affiliate ID, but the cookie is preserved… which makes everyone happy! See how easy that is?
As a Clickbank affiliate, I thank all CB merchants who take the time to hide our affiliate links.
Comments, questions or suggestions? Please leave a comment below!
Cheers,
