Best free redirect for affiliate links?
By horns
URL redirection and shorteners
These are some of the most popular websites which can shorten your URL's and hide your affiliate links.
(List taken from notlong.com/links - not my website)
Some less popular redirection/shorteners
Make your own short links
The best way to hide affiliate links from your visitors is making pages on your site which redirect to various affiliate offers.
For example, lets say you own mycoolwebsite.com, and sell some products through Amazon.
This is your sitemap:
myamazonwebsite.com/index.php
myamazonwebsite.com/about.php
myamazonwebsite.com/product.php
product.php would be some page with description of some product you're selling through Amazon. That page also contains your Amazon affiliate link, but you don't want to risk visitors to delete your affiliate ID so you don't get commision. So you make another page, for example product1.php, which contains the following code:
<html>
<body>
<p align="center">
<a href="http://www.myamazonwebsite.com/product1.php">
http://www.myamazonwebsite.com/product1.php</a></p>
<p align="center">You will be redirected in a few seconds. If not, please click the link above.</p>
<script type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript"><!--
setTimeout('Redirect()',4000);
function Redirect()
{
location.href = 'YOUR AMAZON AFF LINK';
}
// --></script>
</body>
</html>
What exactly will this accomplish?
Well, your affiliate links will look like any other page on your site, judging by its url:
http://www.myamazonwebsite.com/product1.php > a visitor will click on this link without knowing he will be redirected to Amazon with your affiliate link.
The downside of this method: you have to make a new page for each different affiliate link, which can take a lot of time if you're running a big website.
There are also many other methods of redirection, but this one is simple and effective.
Comments
Wow there sloads of redirecting places, I didn't know there was that many, cheers!!
and that explanation really clears things up, when I have a relevant hub that I'm working on I'll link to this hub as it is really useful, thanks!!
Great Resource! A good FREE redirect tool that I regularly use is LinkCloak.com
This has been pretty reliable and also it provides good statistics. And it provides you with a slot where you can actually type in exactly where you're advertising a particular link instead of just supplying you with a bunch of stats/hits like so many other free redirection tools.
The only drawback I see with LinkCloak.com is that you don't have the ability to reset your stats. Ohh well.
Hi,
Thanks for the list of url shortening sites dude :)
Could you add http://shrink.im/ to the list please? Its has a good service and 100% up time, along with being a great site for shortening urls lol :)
Thanks,
Nath
Angela Harris 4 years ago
Thanks for the great explanation.