Clean Up Your Links

A few new affiliate marketers contacted me this week, asking me to take a look at their sites that they’ve been trying to get off the ground. One mistake that I saw several times was the use of obvious affiliate links. When creating a site or blog, you should “hide” your affiliate links when you write. Readers are savvy, and don’t like the idea of being obviously recruited by an affiliate; it makes a reader feel used.

Any link ending with obvious affiliate links (things like ?ref=2347575) will either turn your visitor away OR will cause him or her to open another window and type in the name of the website (withOUT your affiliate code).

I’ve found that in affiliate marketing, the less real info you give your reader about the site you’re sending them to, the more likely they are to click your link. This means that Click here will get more clicks than cashcrate.com, which will get you more clicks than using http://cashcrate.com/341668

I call this “making your links pretty,” because… well, because I’m a mom and moms like pretty things. The technical phrase, I suppose, would be “using html to mask your links.” If you are using a site-building software, chances are that you have a tool bar that has a little “chain link” icon on it. That’s what you’d use to create a nicer-looking link. Simply write out the words that you want to be clickable, highlight them, click the chain link icon, and type in the url with your affiliate code. If the link is going to another site (rather than another page in your site), make sure to indicate that you want this link to open a new window when it’s clicked (most site-building programs ask this when you put in your link).

If you’re using html to build your site (or if you’d like to learn the basic html command for creating a link for future reference), use the following instructions:

• Use an opening bracket like this <
• Add the anchor command a href=” (this basically translates to “this link will redirect to the following url”). So you now have <a href=”
• Add the url with your affiliate link in it, and add the closing quotations (for this example, we’ll use the same one I used above): http://cashcrate.com/341668″ So you now have <a href=”http://cashcrate.com/341668″
• Close that command with a closing bracket > and you now have completed the first part of your html command. It should look something like this (except of course, that it will be your own affiliate url): <a href=”http://cashcrate.com/341668″>
• Type in the words that you want to be hyperlinked (clickable). For this example, I’ll use the words “Click here.” So you now have something that looks like this: <a href=”http://cashcrate.com/341668″> Click here.
• Close your anchor command (which is basically you signaling the computer that “this is the end of the words that I want to be clickable). The closing command is simply </a>
  
• Now you should have some html code that looks like this: <a href=”http://cashcrate.com/341668″> Click here.</a>

In the visual mode (once you’ve saved your work), all that gobblety gook will look like this: Click here.