Your Affiliate Link Buddy

Are you an affiliate? Then you will probably share the following concerns which are often heard by affiliate marketers:

Affiliate links are way too long…

A visible affiliate link is open to bypassing and hacking (resulting in commission theft)

The Way-Too-Long Link

The typical affiliate link will include a lot of references inside the link which makes them long and impossible to handle. Here’s an example of such a link:

http://www.xodomarketing.com/cgi-bin/lyre.cgi/jvm/user/registrar/register.html?owner_id=1&grp=1&patron_id=2532

Send this link to your email list and chances are high the link gets broken, coming out something like…

http://www.xodomarketing.com/cgi-bin/lyre.cgi/jvm/user/registrar/register.html?owner_id=1&grp=1&patron_id=2532

Ask your prospect to cut and paste it into their browser? Nice try, but most prospects will not even bother if you complicate their way to a sales page with such obstacles…

The Let’s-Rip-Your-Commission Link

The other type of affiliate link can be easily changed to either bypass it or to replace your ID with somebody elses. You actually made a sale but you’re not receiving a single penny in commissions…

The best known rip links are those generated for Clickbank products. Commission thieves copy a hoplink and replace it with their own Clickbank ID and now they get your commission instead of you!

“Cloak Your Links!”

This is the advice about everybody will tell you when you complain about losing too much in commissions. However, there is cloaking and cloaking.

When I first started out I received a link cloaking software at some point, which claimed to be dead-easy to use. Being quite new to internet and web hosting at the time, it took me about a day to figure out how to install the script. (“Chmod the cloak folder to 666″ - Right. What the heck was this guy on about?!)

Once I finally had the script working, I had to perform about 6 steps to actually get to my new cloaked affiliate link. As you can imagine, I never even bothered to cloak another link with that software…

“Then Try Javascript…”

“Hey, you can also use some simple javascripts to cover your links up. Use the ‘onMouseOver’ and ‘onMouseOut’ commands inside your HTML links. Add some right-click protection to your source codes. You may even want to consider encrypting it…”

Duh?!

Well, I’m never afraid to learn something new. So surely I tried the javascript. And it seems to work. However, first of all it took me far more than 1 day to figure out how to write the proper lines of script. And secondly, it was still taking way too much time to implement my new knowledge on each and every affiliate link!

The Affiliate Redirect Page

Recently I found a redirect page template that only required me to change some basic information using a simple text editor. It is a simple yet elegant solution to both the way-too-long link problems and the let’s-rip-your-commission link problems.

When a redirect page is activated, it will instantly redirect the visitor to another page. The whole process takes just a few seconds and even though the redirect link is visible in the statusbar for a bit, there usually isn’t enough time to halt the process and change the links.

And of course, a redirect page can be as short as a domain name plus one web page, thus making them ideal to use in email campaigns. Thus creating a redirect page solves both of our problems in one!

So what if I could simplefy this process even more by making it as automated as possible? This template was just screaming at me: “Turn me into a software!”

And that’s what I did…

The Affiliate Link Buddy

A simple yet elegant software tool to make your professional life as an affiliate easier, by creating affiliate redirect pages in less than 5 minutes!

Run the software and answer 4 simple questions:

Name of product

Short product description

Product keywords

Affiliate URL (or tracking link)

(The 2nd and 3rd questions are optional. The information you give here will be added to the meta tags of your redirect page for some basic Search Engine Optimization. You can skip these if you don’t consider this important.)

Then you click Save Results as HTML and your redirect page is ready!

Upload the page to your server and whenever you promote your product, you give the link to your redirect page instead of your affiliate link. When the link is clicked, it will instantly redirect to the product’s sales page.

For example, if you are promoting a product called Mini Site Creator, save the HTML as minisites.html. After you’ve uploaded this page to your server, you redirect customers to http://www.yourDomain.com/minisites.html.

With the Affiliate Link Buddy it takes about 5 minutes to create a redirect page and have it uploaded to your server…

And hey! You can get a free download…

Download Instructions

Click Here To Download Your Free Affiliate Link Buddy

Right-Click this link and select Save Target As…
Specify a location on your computer to save the file to and click OK

Once the file is downloaded, unzip or expand it. (Winzip or Aladin Stuffit provide software to unzip or expand files.)

You should now have a file on your hard drive named AffiliateLinkBuddy.exe Double-click this file to run the software.

If you find your download is corrupted, please try using a download manager. Because it’s a large file, there can be several reasons for it to become corrupted. A download manager will check to see if every single byte was downloaded and resume downloading if anything is missing.

You can get a free manager with www.freshdevices.com.

Why Are You Giving This Away?

Simple: because it’s viral…

What that means is that I have included a couple of my personal referral links to reputable affiliate programs I’ve subscribed to. If you are looking for products to promote, you can sign up with these programs and you will be added to my downline. When you sell them, I will receive some commission for those sales as well.

It’s just another way of adding some passive income streams so I can keep my web business running. And of course I encourage you to give this software away! I’m sure people will love you for doing so.

But then… you just lost a chance to make some extra money with this software yourself…

That is why I also offer you brandable version of the Affiliate Link Buddy software. And I’m not asking much considering all the commissions I loose by letting you promote your own links.

But before you jump ahead and decide that is what you want, try it first for yourself, okay? The software itself includes a link to the order page of the brandable software. Just scroll down to the bottom of the first screen and you will find it waving at you…