Lifeline Blog» Marketing

How to cloak your affiliate links

Sebastian — Fri, 06 May 2011 13:00:31 +0000

Cloaking affiliate links is a common practice among marketers. I’ll show you the reasons and ways you can do it.

Assuming you are promoting a product sold by somesite.com, you will get an URL in the form of http://somesite.com/?affid=1234. Whenever a visitor goes to that link and purchases the product you will get a certain (financial) benefit. The problem is that if you link directly to such an URL, a lot of your visitors may just remove the ?affid=1234 part. Why? There are many possible reasons… Your visitor may think the incentive you get will be billed to them (which is false) or simply won’t want you to make any money off their purchase.

Affiliate link cloaking is a way you can disguise the remote link in such a way that it no longer looks like an affiliate URL. You would basically point your visitors to http://yoursite.com/productXYZ.html that redirects to the affiliate link. I’ll show you three ways to do it.

The simple HTML redirect

This method was widely used by marketers before the spread of hosting services that allow server-side processing. You simply set up an HTML page for each product you want to promote and place this code inside the tag:

http://somesite.com/?affid=1234” />

The URL in red is your affiliate link. The only downside of this method is that you will have oodles of HTML pages to manage if you promote lots of products. It is also inconsistent – if you promote various products on the same site that have URL’s like somesite.com/?affid=1234&prodid=5678, &prodid=8901 and so on and your affiliate ID changes you will have lots of pages to edit by hand.

The server-side redirect

Assuming you use PHP on your server, you can set up redirects with a simple line like

http://somesite.com/?affid=1234”); ?>

The advantage over the aforementioned method is that you can build a script that dynamically queries a database and redirects the user to a given site based on a parameter. You can have yoursite.com/?redirect=1 point to somesite.com/?affid=1234 and yoursite.com/?redirect=2 point to othersite.com/?affid=xyzt.

The .htaccess redirect

If you would rather not use PHP or another server-side programming language and want to manage all your redirects unitarily without setting up individual HTML pages for each, you can simply dump all your affiliate links in your .htaccess file like in this example:

Redirect /product1 http://somesite.com/?affid=1234

Redirect /product2 http://someothersite.com/go/xyzt

Redirect /product3 http://thirdsite.com/index.php?promoterID=john

This method may come in handy if your host doesn’t support any server-side programming language (are there still any that don’t?) or if you need a quick way of deploying your links without doing any programming.

Human Nature and Quality Web Design

Dave — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 13:00:59 +0000

If you’ve read any of my previous posts, you’ll know that I often talk about the importance of having your business represented online by a professional web design. You may or may not agree with me on that, but regardless of what either of us believe it still just boils down to human nature.

Whether we want to admit it or not, everyone reading this article have at one point or another made a snap judgement about another person based on their appearance. Some of us do it a lot, some of us don’t. Some of us feel bad when we do it, some of us don’t, but it’s part of our natural behavior…to judge a book by it’s cover.

If we’re so quick to make a decision about a living breathing human being, how much quicker will we be to judge a business when we visit it’s website? I can promise you that no one is going to feel bad about forming a negative opinion of a business if a poor website is the first point of contact. The stakes are higher in this case, because a poor impression of the business will most likely result in the potential customer looking elsewhere for the product or service they need.

For you personally the Internet may not have any relevance for business, but that doesn’t mean the same is true for your customers. In fact the opposite is more likely to be true. Each day that passes brings more importance to your businesses use of modern advertising technologies like websites and social media. If you are ignoring this I guarantee your business is sacrificing potential revenue that could be won with a proper online strategy.

You may be quick to point out many businesses who are successful with a poor website or even without one, but I’ve yet to see a case where it wasn’t success despite a poor online strategy not because of it. In every case I’ve seen the business could be more successful by leveraging the power of the Internet properly. I’m not saying businesses that don’t need or would be hindered by the Internet don’t exist, but I can guarantee they are in such minority that they are more or less a blip on the radar.

Loyalty Program Angst!

Dave — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 15:55:18 +0000

I’m branching out a little bit today, talking about marketing in general. If you live in and around the Brantford area, you’ve probably heard about the Blue Dog Cafe, and if you haven’t, you should get out from the rock you’ve been living under and check it out. So despite where we’re going in the bottom half of this post, I want to say before hand that the Blue Dog is one of my favorite places to escape the office for a few hours and get some work done in a laid back cafe environment.

Like many cafes, the Blue Dog has a loyalty program. This is where things make my internal marketer flip his lid a little bit. It is your standard “buy x number of drinks, get one free” program, with one important exception. You need an individual card for each drink you purchase. So, if I go one day and buy a small coffee, I need a new loyalty card for that. If I go the next day and order a medium coffee, I need another card. If I order a large coffee the next time I need yet another card, and so on and so forth. So unless you are the type of person who orders the exact same thing every single time without fail, it can become a huge hassle to keep track of 20 different cards in your wallet or purse.

Now don’t get me wrong, I totally get where management is coming from — if I had to hazard a guess, I would speculate that they are looking to avoid the individual who will buy all small coffees and then trade in their free drink for the most expensive large specialty drink on the menu. I don’t have detailed demographic information, so this may be a valid concern that could cause the cafe to lose money, however the typical crowd that goes to an establishment like the Blue Dog isn’t price motivated… if they were, they’d likely balk at spending three to four dollars on a specialty coffee or beverage in the first place.

However, it would be relatively easy to group drinks into categories or sizes and bring the total loyalty card combination possibility down to a reasonable level (perhaps small, medium, and large cards for example). Currently, I don’t even bother with it most of the time I’m there because if I did, I’d end up with 10 – 20 different cards in my wallet. What irks me about the situation is not that I’m missing out on a free drink every now and then (while that does make me a little sad!), I’m more bothered by the purpose of a loyalty program and how the Blue Dog’s system isn’t accomplishing that purpose.

Loyalty programs are developed to, if you can believe it, instill loyalty in the customer. If you boil loyalty down to its most basic element, it will result in a choice of Business A over Business B. Sure, there are a lot of fuzzy feelings associated with loyalty, and as a business owner, I can vouch for the satisfaction in a job well done and a customer who will be fiercely loyal to your company because of the great job you’ve done for them. However, looking at it from a purely economical standpoint, loyalty results in more revenue for your business at the end of the day.

The current loyalty program there is extremely inconvenient for anyone who doesn’t drink the same thing consistently, and as such I (and others I’ve spoken with) often don’t even bother with it. As a result, when making a decision of what cafe to go to (and sometimes I go elsewhere), the loyalty program has no bearing on the decision… but if it was doing the job right, it would.

To sum it up in a sentence: I like the Blue Dog a lot, but the loyalty program drives my marketing side nuts.

Editor’s Note: I also love the Blue Dog, but this drives me nuts… I have about 8 different cards in my wallet, including one for “medium latte with flavor shot” and another for plain “medium latte”. Are you kidding me? Why not do what nearly ALL OTHER loyalty programs do, and assign a dollar value to the ‘free drink’ at the end of the card? Make it something reasonable, like $3 max. Or “any small beverage”. Or, if they wanted to go the really easy route, why not just offer a “small medium coffee or tea” (or a coffee/tea of any size, really)? That would make it easier on the baristas, the management, AND the clientele. It’s pure logic, coupled with a knowledge of other loyalty programs that actually work.