Direct linking how-to for affiliates: url shortening, iframe, redirect

Affiliate marketing in short words: you drive traffic to the advertiser's landing page, where traffic converts. Direkt linking is, if you drive traffic from e. g. Facebook ad campaign or Bing directly to the advertiser's landing page. You give as the target url for the ad campaign the tracking url of the advertiser's landing page. Direct linking lets CTR grow, cause there isn't any page between your bought visitor and advertiser's landing page - the visitor goes directly to the converting page. But firstly AdWords, then Facebook, then Bing and other try to prevent direct linking of affiliate offers. Firstly affected are Clickbank links, then many other. Nevertheless there are ways to direct-link ads to affiliate offers. In general there are 3 ways: you will successfully direct-link your offers, if you use not a single method alone, but a combination of these methods.
1. The first way is to mask you affiliate url. It seems on the first look simple - there are many well-known good and free url shortening services, like bit.ly, goo.gl etc. The problem here is: if you know about them, Google, Facebook, Bing and Co know about them too. And block them from using. What could we do? - Exact, we create our own url shortening service and use it for affiliate url cloacking. Requirement: own hosting with PHP/MySQL and registered domain. Then go to http://yourls.org/, follow instructions and you get your own url shortening service, which will shorten/mask/cloack and monitor all of your affiliate urls. I personally use a combination of my own hosted instance of yourls.org and goo.gl.

2. The second way is to use iframe to hide the affiliate offer "behind" your own hosted page. I use following short and simple code to iframe affiliate offers:

<!doctype html>
<html prefix="og: http://ogp.me/ns#" lang="en" >
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8" />
<title>Title</title>
<link rel="author" href="http://google.com/+Evgeniy-Orlov?rel=author"/>
<meta property="og:title" content=""/>
<meta property="og:description" content="" />
<base target="_blank" />
</head>
<body>
<iframe style="width: 100%; height: 100%;" 
src="http://your-tracking-url.com" 
scrolling="no" frameborder="0"></iframe>
</body>
</html>

3. The third way is to use a redirect. We provide as the target url for the ad campaign our own hosted page, but this page contains a redirect to the affiliate offer / tracking url. There are some types of redirect, which could be utilized for our purpose: i recommend, as i said befor, to use more then one type. Here you find a code of some redirect types you can use:

<!--HTML redirect-->
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=http://your-tracking-url.com"/>
<!--PHP redirect 1-->
<?php
header("Location: http://your-tracking-url.com", TRUE, 303);
exit;
?>
<!--PHP redirect 2-->
<?php
$redirect_url = "http://your-tracking-url.com";
header("Location: $redirect_url");
?>
<!--JavaScript redirect-->
<script type="text/javascript">
window.location.href = "http://your-tracking-url.com"
</script>

To get things done i recommend once more to use more then one method at once. Good luck and enjoy the summer!

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Freitag, 30. Mai 2014