In Marketing, appearances can make a huge difference. Professional looking web pages will make more sales than so so looking pages. Likewise, the image that the URL of a web page portrays can make a huge difference in the amount of click throughs that it gets. Those long affiliate addresses may point to a professional looking page, but you might not be getting all the click throughs that you should.
Compare the following addresses and then decide which one you are more apt to click on:
http://www.toasteraffiliatesite.com/cgi-bin/affiliates/clickthru.cgi?id=you
http://www.YourSites.com/Toasters
Not a tough decision, is it. Just for readability alone, the second one wins.
Okay, now that you're convinced let's talk about how to do it.
For some time now I knew that I really had to tackle this job, but wasn't looking forward to it. After all, it involves editing html code. I'd rather write my ezine or answer emails. What a pleasant surprise I had to find that the job was completed in just a few short minutes. It is actually a very easy thing to do.
For this example we are going to assume that you belong to an affiliate program that sells toasters (I'm not aware of any in existence).
Here are the steps:
1) Create a new page in your Web page editing program. You should title it something like http://www.yoursites.com/toasters.htm
2) Go into the html code editor of your program (unless of course you are creating it from straight html).
3) Delete all codes that are already there.
4) Copy the following code and paste it into your html editor.
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="refresh"
content="0; url=http://www.Toasteraffiliatesite.com
/cgi-bin/affiliates/clickthru.cgi?id=you">
<title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
The only change that you will want to make to the above code for your real affiliate program is to replace "http://www.Toasteraffiliatesite.com/cgi-bin/affiliates/clickthru.cgi?id=you" with the actual address to your own page affiliate program. Don't forget to include your unique identity at the end so that the affiliate program software can credit you with the business that comes in from your efforts.
5) Change the address on your advertising to reflect the new, professional address that you have just created for your affiliate programs.
There is another possibility for this coding. You can track your site traffic more efficiently. What if you had just created three ads for your affiliate program and you wanted to test them before investing a lot of money into promoting them. How could you use this method to do that?
Easy! Just create three separate redirect pages. They could be named:
http://www.yoursites.com/toasters1.htm
http://www.yoursites.com/toasters2.htm, and
http://www.yoursites.com/toasters3.htm
You would then cue the URL's with the three different ads and you've got a bulletproof tracking system for your test run.
There is another variation to this method. Instead of creating a new page for each ad you can keep the original address and simply insert a question mark after the .htm (or .html) and add your own ad codes.
Here is an example:
http://www.yoursites.com/toasters.htm?test1
This will not affect the actual link address location. However many stats programs will read it so you can see the results of your ad testing in the statistics.
Chris Small is a partner www.WorldDealCenter.com
If you enjoyed this report and would like to receive information like this from Chris for FREE, simply subscribe to his ezine WebSmarts WebSmarts@worlddealcenter.com with "Subscribe" in the subject
