How to create Permanent and Customized affiliate links with htaccess

Posted by Felix Okoli on Wednesday December 24, 2014 at 15:11:9:

I've signed up with a lot of online affiliate programs and as you should already know, those are online programs that allow people to make some money for every sale they refer. One of the things I've noticed about some affiliate programs is that at times they tend to change their affiliate links and if you ask me, I think this is a bad practice and something that affiliates should try and avoid if they can.

I know of some successful affiliate marketers that have made good money from their efforts as a result of referrals they've made using affiliate links provided by merchants and some of them have gone as far as embedding many of these links directly on their web pages without customizing or localizing it but what could easily kill their affiliate income overnight is when the merchant unilaterally decides to change his affiliate platform overnight and that may invalidate the old affiliate links - The affiliate will still be driving traffic to the merchant but not making money for his efforts.

It can be hard for a website owner and affiliate to try to change all the affiliate links embedded in his entire website just because a single seller changes the links overnight. It would be easier if the affiliate could just also do a simple action that would also change the old links into valid new links. Well, it's possible and that's what I'm going to share here. All he needs to do in the first place is to only use custom and permanent affiliate links.

Let's assume you've signed up for an affiliate program with a merchant named Hubpages and the affiliate url given to you reads something like this: hubpages.com/this-is-a-great-site-to-make-paypal-money-writing and you feel the need to customize it, well you can do this within your site's htaccess file.

How to do it
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Let's assume your website's domain is makemoneykenya.com and you want to customize the affiliate link;

- Log into your website's control panel and go to file manager
- Look for the htaccess file and choose to edit it.
- Enter the following codes:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^makemoneykenya\.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.makemoneykenya\.com$

RewriteRule ^go\/hubpages "http://hubpages.com/this-is-a-great-site-to-make-paypal-money-writing" [R=301,L]

That's all!

When next you are making a blog post about your merchant and just want to refer people to it using a more permanent and customized affiliate link, all you need to do then is just quote your new url link e.g: makemoneykenya.com/go/hubpages and they will be sent to the affiliate link you've redirected using your htaccess file.

The good thing about customizing your affiliate links is that it allows you to easily change it by editing a single file rather than editing many pages or blog posts in your website. Also, it makes

So, when the seller changes the links and you don't want to lose out the traffic you are already sending to him, you don't need to change the affiliate links sitewide when all you can do is just edit a single file to reflect the new links.

You can also use a customized affiliate link to send traffic to multiple merchants over a period of time just to know which one them performs better. If you have a custom affiliate links from your website such as www.makemoneykenya.com/go/forex, you could use it to send traffic to any forex merchants like AGEA, Finexo, LiteForex, Oanda and so on over different periods of time by simply redirecting the url using your htaccess file but the custom url will remain the same all through that period.

Custom, permanent or shorter affiliate links tend to helpd add value to your website in the eyes of your visitors and also makes it easy to remember for you and your readers. It can be hard trying to remember every affiliate program yo uare signed up for when writing an article for publication on the internet but if you could remember the keywords like forex, make-money, ebook, shopping, laptops and so on, it would be easy for you to just create a link without bothering much about using a longer url.

Shortening and customizing your affiliate link is the smart way to go if you want to be a successful affiliate marketer in our world of today and if you happen to visit most successful blogs that make use of affiliate links, you'd notice that they actually have customized their referral links into shorter and more friendly urls.