Affiliate programs are notorious for giving affiliates long, complicated affiliate links. Ever since affiliate programs first came online, we’ve been thinking up neat ways to make links shorter.
The other problem affiliates must figure out if we’re to be effective in our marketing, is tracking our marketing efforts. How many sales from the last month have come from your Facebook link as opposed to your Twitter link or email newsletter?
That’s a big concern once you get serious about affiliate marketing.
My personal favorite affiliate link shortening and tracking solution: Pretty Link Pro.
Pretty Link Pro is a WordPress plugin that does more than Bit.ly or other options. It works with your own URL and turns something like this: http://prettylinkpro.com/amember/go.php?r=3776&i=l1 into this: http://jackhumphrey.com/plp.
From the Pretty Link Pro developer:
Pretty Link Pro is a Plugin for WordPress that will enable you to shrink, cloak, track, organize, share and test all of your links on your own domain and server.
Pretty Link Pro is more than a mere Affiliate Link Cloaker or URL shortener — it will revolutionize how you approach your business by allowing you to automate repetitive tasks, optimize your site with testing, see the results of your campaigns immediately and virally spread your links—including all your Affiliate Links within minutes!
Automation is one of the many cool features in Pretty Link Pro. You can have PLP go through your entire blog and assign pretty affiliate links to specific keywords, turning regular blog posts into money-makers by including links to affiliate products. And it all happens with the click of a button.
Tracking, cloaking (protecting), and organizing your affiliate links on your own domain is very important.
I learned this the hard way. Using one of the free, far less capable, services I lost all my affiliate links. I was left with having to start all over. That’s a big deal when you’ve blogged for years using the same shortened URLs for myriad affiliate recommendations made over hundreds, even thousands of blog posts. You have to go back to your blog and change all the links to ones that work and set up a whole new system all at once or you start to lose money immediately.
So, don’t go through what I did. Cheaping out on this part of your affiliate business is a big mistake. Get Pretty Link Pro and run your affiliate marketing business the right way from the start!