Pimp Your Affiliate Links

Ok, so the latest trend that has come down the pike is to promote products through your blog.

Typically, the blogger will write a review of a product and whether he recommends it. Hopefully, the blogger is honest and doesn’t say a product is good when it really sucks.

Anyhow, there appears to be a stigma attached to affiliate links.

Consider this case…Joe Blogger writes a review of ‘Earn 1K A Day‘ and says it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread.

A vast majority of people will hover thier cursor over the link above and see what it says in the taskbar.

http://geoffreyf6.earn1kaday.hop.clickbank.net

Now, if you hover your cursor over both links, you’ll see something different for each one.

The first displays ‘Earn 1K A Day‘ while the second displays the URL.

When a reader sees that it’s an affiliate link, they might not be inclined to click on it because they think the information is biased (whatevah!)

So what’s the solution? Well, for my wordpress blog, I use a tool called WordPress Affiliate Pro.

What this allows me to do is to change the status bar info as well as ‘cloak’ the link. Basically, the reader won’t see that it’s an affiliate link.

Now, you can be evil and use this to try and scam your readers but eventually they’ll catch on so I’d recommend using it for the following reasons:

1. Tracking - WordPress Affiliate Pro tracks all the clicks on a particular link. I love this particular feature because I can see what interests my readers.
2. Change status bar text.
3. Cloak your keyword so that it takes more work to steal your commissions. Locked doors are there to keep honest people honest.
4. Replace all keywords found with a link to WordPress Affiliate Pro on your site which then forwards to the affiliate URL.

Here’s the administration panel. As you can see in the picture below there are a few things that I’ve promoted on my blog. However, one thing to note, you can rest assured that I’ll only link to it if I think it’ll be useful and the product is good.

G-Man