» By: David McKenzie
As an affiliate I use affiliate links at various places throughout my web site, in emails and in other online promotions. These affiliate links are usually long and have a number or word to define who the affiliate is. As well as using these ‘direct’ affiliate links I have also used redirect pages (or what I might call ‘indirect’ affiliate links) on my web site as well. These are blank web pages whose sole purpose is to redirect the visitor to the affiliate page. I recently did a comparison between direct affiliate links and redirect pages and the results were astounding! The redirect pages outperformed direct affiliate links about 2 to 1 when placed in the same position on my web site. This meant twice as many people were clicking the indirect affiliate link as were clicking the direct affiliate link. Why? I have no idea about the logic behind this but it appears that visitors are less inclined to click a link when they know it is an affiliate link. They would rather have the thought in their mind “I want to buy direct”. I must admit I do not think like this because I have bought many times through affiliate links but I guess I’m an affiliate so perhaps I think differently to people who are not affiliates. So if redirect pages work so well, how do you create one? It’s really simpler than you might think. First, create a new web page on your site. Just leave it as a blank page. Then just put the following piece of code between the header tags: You will need to replace the URL “myaffiliatelink.com” with your own affiliate program link. If you are in 5 different affiliate programs you will need to set up 5 separate pages for each affiliate link. Now you can use each redirect page link in your promotions instead of the affiliate link. When someone clicks on your redirect page link the following 2 things happen: 1. They get taken to your redirect page which is a blank page. This lasts a few seconds. 2. The command in your header tag then forwards the visitor directly to the affiliate site. The best thing about redirect pages is they do not look like affiliate links. They just look like normal pages. For those people that DO have a problem buying through affiliate links, they are unaware that the redirect page is actually an affiliate link. Try using redirect pages for your affiliate links. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the results.