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Shortening Affiliate Links

(Not a fan of reading? See this affiliate link shortening tutorial as a video)

Placing affiliate links on your website, facebook page, or twitter account, generally means placing a link with an affiliate ID in it, eg, https://www.php-web-host.com/billing/aff.php?pid=1&promocode=1st_Home&aff=003. There are two problems with links like these:

People might remove your ID

There is a strong possibility that people wanting to visit the link might copy the link without your affiliate ID. If they do this, you will not be credited with the sale as the tracking code was removed. Many people on the internet deliberately remove these ID's from links. Using a link shortner removes this problem completely.

It is cumbersome to type

If your link needs to be manually typed in, then it is very prone to error. Imagine, your link being typed in incorrectly and another affiliate earning your commissions! Now you might think this doesn't apply to you because you won't be using your affiliate ID in any print material, right? Wrong! Its very reasonable to assume that some of your audience might print your web page for later offline reading. If they do this and then want to go to your affiliate link, they will need to type it in. Having a shorter URL makes this much easier, and less error prone.

The solution

We use ZA24.in, URL Shortening Service to shorten our links. That means that our link above, https://www.php-web-host.com/billing/aff.php?pid=1&promocode=1st_Home&aff=003 becomes http://za24.in/M82. This link is obviously much shorter, so people needing to type it in are much less likely to make a mistake, but there is also no chance that anyone can remove your affiliate ID.

Its Automatic

You can go to ZA24.in, URL Shortening Service and shorten any URL you want to, but if you want to shorten your PHP-Web-Host.com affiliate links, then its all automatic. All you need to do is go to ZA24.in, URL Shortening Service and register. Its free to register.

Once you've logged in, on the dashboard screen you will see an API hash. Copy this API hash, then log into your PHP-Web-Host.com affiliate program. Click on the Link Shortner link and enter this hash. When you now look at the banner links, they will automatically be converted into short links!

To check that its saved correctly, you can log into ZA24.in, URL Shortening Service and click on dashboard. There you will see a listing of your shortened links, so you can easily see that they are saved correctly, as well as how many clicks they've had.

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