Effective Referral Linking

There are a ton of webmasters out there that make a descent living off of referral or text link ad income. Some do it better than others. There are several factors that can play into how successful their sites are, are they optimized for search traffic, is the target audience being reached, and the methods they used to get the ads clicked.

Integrating Ads Into Content

Check out Online TV. Here is a great example on how to link to sites with your affiliate code. When you look at the site, you will probably see the Google ads. They are hard to miss. The part that I am talking about is the top right menu.

What makes this menu great is the fact that it’s not really a menu at all. It’s links to another site, and when you use it, the site owner starts making money. A great method to get visitors to click on your ads is getting your ads to blend with your content. On this site, it’s done on a superb level, minus the Google Ads.

Redirects

Another great way to keep from people from editing your referral link, and also make it appear to link to your site is by using a htaccess redirect. By editing your htaccess file you can have a link on your site point to a specified folder, and your htaccess will 302 it (redirect it) with the referral link.  Online TV uses this method as well on their Watch Movies Online page. It’s in the form of a  text link in the main content.

To accomplish this all you have to do is create a folder on your site, put nothing in it besides your htaccess file, and make the access file read like this:

Redirect 302 /[subdir]/[filename] http://affiliatesite_example.com/?id=123

There are a ton of tutorials out their on how to do this, and to do it with several affiliate links. The whole process is very easy though. So next time you think about putting an ad or an affiliate link on your site, think how will this effect my visitors, and how effective will it be. If it’s not worth the time to blend professionally with your site, I say don’t do it at all.