Do Or Die: Track and Manage Your Affiliate Links
If you’re familiar with the 80/20 principle, you’ll understand that about 80% of your income comes from just 20% of your effort. This means that only 20% of the things you do directly effect the amount of money you make from your blog. It may be different from person to person, but the general rule of thumb applies.
So what about the 80% of the things that you do that are a complete waste of your time? A few I can think of include:
- constantly changing and tweaking your WordPress theme
- checking your web stats and affiliate sales 3-5 times a day
- reading way too many blogs instead of writing for your own
- unnecessary trouble shooting and “fire fighting”
Speaking of “fire fighting”, let me tell you a true story. You’ll see why I wasted 80% of my time and got nothing out of it. Hint: you may be doing the same thing.
When I started making money online with my first affiliate program, I copied all the affiliate links and used them directly on my website. It was pretty straightforward at first, but eventually my site grew to more than 150 pages – that meant I had at least 150 “naked” affiliate links all over the place.
For a while, it didn’t matter. I was making money, the world was great. My 20% did the job.
Then without warning one day, the advertiser moved its entire program from Commission Junction to Link Share. Everything changed in the blink of an eye. Now I had more than 150 dead affiliate links scattered all over the place, and the race to save my income was on.
Every passing minute meant a loss of affiliate sales. It took me over 7 days to find, replace and validate all the affiliate links on my site. Even then, I could not do anything about the links I had posted in forums, article directories and social bookmarking sites.
I was spending 80% of my time “fire fighting” – trying to put out the fire caused by my own oversight not too long ago.
Think about it; if you’re currently promoting any affiliate program using the naked affiliate link instead of a link management system like Ninja Affiliate, what would you do if:
- You’ve aggressively promoted an affiliate link in forums and blogs, only to have the product you’re promoting discontinued or changed..
- You’ve naively used naked affiliate links inside most of your blog posts, only to have the product owner announce two weeks down the road that he’s migrating to a new affiliate software and that you have to update all your links ASAP in order to continue getting commissions..
- You’ve scattered links all over the place only to find the product doesn’t convert. You’ve found a better replacement but who’s going to do the dirty job of updating al the links?
As the Russians say, “Measure Seven Times, Cut Once”. Plan to do things the smart way and you’ll never have to waste your time in the future correcting mistakes that could have been avoided in the first place.
Using Ninja Affiliate, you should only use a “redirect link” that forwards traffic to your actual affiliate link. Here’s how easy it is to do:
- Step 1: Enter the a “Link Name” for your reference
- Step 2: Enter the actual affiliate link
- Step 3: Create a Ninja Link or redirect link
- Step 4: Assign it to a group (if you have many links)
Now when you promote your links on your blog or in forums, use only the Ninja Link. Let all traffic flow through your Ninja Link and resolve (redirect) to your actual affiliate link. Besides making your links look professional, you’re also doing things the smart way.
One day you get an email from a marketer (me maybe?) telling you that guess what, the entire affiliate program had been moved from Clickbank to PayDotCom. All you have to do is replace one affiliate link in your Ninja Affiliate admin panel – not hundreds of scattered links.
This is why Ninja Affiliate is getting rave reviews from professional bloggers and affiliate marketers – because it works like magic. If you haven’t got yourself a copy of Ninja Affiliate, you should.
A lot of us spend 80% of our time doing nonsense tasks that lead to only 20% of our income.Do it right the first time and you too can live the 80/20 principle, make more money, and live a better life.
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Great post! I will check it out.
Jeremy Butler
Kingdomlifemedia.com
But Pawan, in reference to your last paragraph, why would I want to live the 80/20 principle of 80% doing nonsense tasks, and 20% earning income?
Alex, that’s just an example of how most of the people use their time. You should actually do the opposite.
Great post,
I use to check my stats everyday…. and I know i doesn’t change anything… The old links is the one that I hate.. I am so lazy to fix it one by one in old post… your software fix small things that really matters
Great information.
Even if the program that you are promoting does move or go down but if you just find a better product that does the same thing you do not have to run around replacing links. Just go into whatever tracking program you are using and change the URL and keep the same tracking URL you have been using. This has saved me a ton of time and I am glad someone talked about it.
Well done Pawan.
Just bought a copy of the Ninja..and what a great tool !
I have used other affiliate link system ..but this one is the best.
… why not a non blog version ? ..or even better ..one admin that does blogs and sites !
Cheers
Roy
This is a good post and it is totally true. The best thing to do is stay away from direct linking and direct affiliate links. I haven’t purchased the Ninja Affiliate plugin yet, but I have been using an htaccess file with redirect code, which seems to work pretty well. When sellers change their affiliate codes, I just replace the htaccess file. Works great!
@Chris I have been running my blog for nearly 2 years, and I have never experienced a seller changing their affiliate link. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, I would just like to know, how often DOES it happen?
Thanks for the tips! I really learned a lot, especially about the ways on how not to waste time regarding maintaining a blog.
Your WP CMS Blog is really quite good. Easy to read, easy on the eyes. The NAP is very effective. So are your other WP Plugin scripts. NAP takes the complexity out of achieving redirects by building the necessary php code in the background.
The above results can be achieved using a 3 line code and saving the file with a php extension. And the number of CTRs can be read in any standard web log, such as C-Panel’s Awstats.
And anyone could learn how to do that in a couple of hours. However, with NAP, this code is automatically generated. Plus it keeps records of all the Awstats regarding the redirects for you in one convenient place. NAP saves time having to create each redirect separately and uploading the php files.
I am happy to be a little late in your affiliate program, because with you Pawan, its like having a hired outsourced writer who has given your affiliates continuous reasons to promote NAP. I think you have already written some eight articles on NAP alone. Well done! Thanks you very much.
Hi, I use a few of your plugins ( paid and free) and am on your list but I respectively suggest that by allowing crap posts, like the one above, to appear on your site you are not doing yourself any favors in my eyes - as a potential purchaser of your newer plugins.
Don’t you moderate that stuff?
Thanks Clive, for pointing this out. I have deleted that comment. I usually receive huge number of spam comments so sometime few of them slips in.