Getting the Click

[StephenR]

I have posted this once before but thought I would share it here...

As an affiliate marketer I'm sure you're aware that people get a little leery clicking on an affiliate URL that looks like http://www.search-engine-optimizatio.../referID=12345. Bells and whistels go off in their head because they see that link an automatically know someones trying to sell them something.

So what's an affiliate to do? Here's some quick and easy approaches many affiliate marketers implement but many new marketers may not be aware of.

Open up Notepad or your favorite HTML editor and copy and paste the following HTML code into the page. For this example I've used http://www.search-engine-optimizatio.../referID=12345 as the affiliate URL. Replace that URL with your merchant generated affiliate link for whatever program your creating this page for.

Now that you've added the code to your Web page you need to name the .html appropriately. For this ongoing example we would name the new Web page search-engine-optimization-tools.html. Now upload this new page to your root Web page directory. On many web hosts this is the /html or yourdomain.com/html.

Now when you promote this SEO tool you would use the link:

http://www.yoursite.com/search-engine-optimization-tools.html

Adding a link such as this for your site will also help with anchor text optimization.

If you operated a search engine optimization site and wanted to promote this product you would use the new link in your Web site like so for anchor text optimization:

Welcome to my web site! I review the best search engine optimization tools on the market.

In the above example search engine optimization tools is your anchor text.

As another affiliate marketer identified to me this can also be done via a .htaccess redirect as follows:

Use this in your HTML page:

http://www.somesite.com/somepage.html

Use this in your .htaccess file:

redirect /somepage.html http://www.someaffiliate.com/?id=1234

An .htaccess redirect is quicker and less noticeable by the user but it does not aid in anchor text SEO like the 1st example. Just choose the most appropriate method that suits your needs.

I hope this little tidbit helped some of you affiliate marketers out. If your unfamiliar with "anchor text optimization" here are some great links that offer an abundance of information which cannot be discussed here for brevity’s sake:

http://www.seorank.com/anchor-text-optimization.php
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/ooar123...chor-text.html
http://www.seo-guy.com/seo-tutorial/...chor-text.html

Here are some helpful links on .htaccess redirection:

http://www.javascriptkit.com/howto/htaccess7.shtml
http://support.powweb.com/index.php?...ss&topic_id=28
http://www.issociate.de/board/post/1...direction.html
http://www.yourhtmlsource.com/sitema...rewriting.html

[Linda Buquet]

That was another REALLY good post Stephen. Thanks so much for sharing the tips and the links to the great resources.

Me and our readers APPRECIATE YOU!