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Online Marketing Glossary: Affiliate Link
Affiliate Link:
- A piece of code residing in a graphic image or piece of text that is placed on an affiliate’s webpage, notifying the merchant that an affiliate should be credited for the customer or visitor sent to their website.
Traditionally these links have been within banner images or text links, but more and more people are turning to dynamic widgets. Amazon has been the one of the best advertisers to come out with new and dynamic widgets, like their mp3 widgets and carousel widgets.
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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine
Online Marketing Glossary: Tracking Method
Tracking Method:
- The way a program tracks referred sales, leads, or clicks. The most common is by unique Web address for each affiliate or by embedding an affiliate ID number into the link that is processed by the merchant’s software.
This link is the lifeblood of affiliates. Some smaller networks base the tracking ID within the link on the user name of the affiliate. Larger networks with a greater number of affiliates use a unique user ID or website ID number to track links.
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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine
PHP Affiliate Link Masking
If you’re like me and have jumped into affiliate marketing head on, you may not know some of the nuances of using affiliate links. Recently, James Seligman of JMCA Media schooled me on how to really easily set up PHP redirects for your affiliate links to make them a bit more user friendly. Let me share this knowledge with you!
- Open up Notepad or a similar text editing program.
- Add the following code:
<?
header(“location:affiliate-link-goes-here“);
?> - Replace the portion in italics above with the tracked link from the program of your choice.
- Save the file as a .php file with whatever name is easiest for you.
- Upload it to a designated diretory or folder on your website. Some possible names for the folder are recommends, deals, however you can call it whatever is easiest for you.
- When you want to add an affiliate link, just add the code <a href=”/recommends/affiliate.php”>Affiliate </a>
It’s that simple! I had head of PHP redirects before but, not knowing PHP very well myself, I never looked into how to do it. Luckily James was there to show me just how easy it is! And now you have a weekend project to go mask all your affiliate links!
Read MoreLink Glossary: Deep Link
Deep Link:
- Linking to a webpage buried within a website. These pages are referred to as “deep” because they are often two or more directories deep within a website.
Deep linking is important to affiliate marketers. An affiliate link that goes right to the product being advertised is more likely to convert to a sale than a link that goes to a general home page or landing page. As a common linking courtesy you should always deep link for the benefit of readers to get them right to the information you are citing.
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Glossary Definition From The Definitive Guide to Link Buying by Patrick Gavin
Alternate Language Creative
I was presented with an interesting dilemma last week. An affiliate contacted me and pointed out that their visitor base consists mostly of non-English speaking users.
Of course we’re willing to accommodate this publisher. He’s excited about the program enough to ask for the creative that his visitors will understand and connect with. Now in this case the language in question was Spanish, which I don’t personally speak. So I gave the publisher the opportunity to give me the copy and we can work from there.
This makes me wonder how other affiliate managers deal with creating custom ads appealing to different demographics, languages, cultures, etc. Do they always create a few different versions of an ad for other demographics or take the requests in as they come? I guess it depends on their program and the types of publishers they have.
For the time being, I’m sticking with a case-by-case basis, although I know eventually it’ll need to be automated lest I go insane trying to appease these requests. I’ve said it many times before that everyone needs printing, in all languages, so eventually I can see the reach of our program extending across demographics. Eventually it would definitely be nice to come out of the gate with multiple versions of same ads. Networks, if you’re reading, you should work in a way to add different versions and not count against our total link count.
Alas, I’m betting that no one from any affiliate networks reads this so my plea will go unseen.
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