Changing All Affiliate Links At Once

March 1, 2008 | General Affiliating, Tips and Tricks

There will occasionally be times in your life as an affiliate where you will have to change all of your affiliate links for one particular poker room. This could be because the room changes the way it uses affiliate links, or because the room changes it’s domain name. Either way, it can be one big hassle to go through your entire site changing each affiliate link as you go along. However, there is one simple solution that will allow you to change all of your affiliate links for one room throughout your site… using a PHP redirect.

This works by creating a page in your site that automatically sends that person to the poker website. The page will use a PHP redirect, which will mean that as soon as someone visits this page they will be immediately be redirected to the page (or website in this case) through your affiliate link. For example, you can create a file called pokerstars.html and use a specific code to send your visitor to that poker room site through your affiliate link within the file. Therefore if you link to this file instead of using an affiliate link every time, you will be able to change all of your affiliate links by simply changing the one affiliate link that is contained within this file.

As you can hopefully see from the example above, PHP Redirect makes things so much easier for affiliate links, as it will mean that you only have to change one affiliate link for PHP redirecting if you ever need to change them. Whereas you would need to change each individual link in the ’standard’ way.

This may seem pretty complicated, but it is probably harder to explain than actually do, so I suggest you give it a go to see how it works. Try creating a webpage file with the following code in it, replacing the link with any affiliate link. Then visit that webpage on your site and you will see that you are immediately redirected to the website through your affiliate link.

The Code

<?php
header( ‘Location: http://www.youraffiliatelinkhere.com’ ) ;
?>

IMPORTANT: Make sure that this is the only code within the page, otherwise it will not work. So make sure to get rid of any head, body tags or anthing else that might be on the page.

So if you call this file pokerstars.html, then everytime you link to www.yoursite.com/pokerstars.html and a visitor clicks on it, they will be redirected to the pokerstars site through your link. It is all pretty simple, and saves a hell of a lot of hassle if it turns out that you have to change your affiliate links one day. All you will have to do using this method is change the ‘http://www.youraffiliatelinkhere.com’ part and everything will work fine.

Also Shortens Affiliate Links

The great thing with this method is that it makes your affiliate links a lot shorter and sweeter. So instead of having long affiliate links with lots of random symbols showing up at the bottom of the browser when a visitor hovers over the link, they will see something a lot nicer looking like http://www.yoursite.com/pokerstars.html. For example, this is how a full tilt link can appear at the bottom of your browser window when you hover over the link:

Alternatively, you can create a sub folder like ‘go’, and then create further subfolders for each poker room and create an index.html file containing the specific code for each room redirect. This will do the exact same thing as the method above, but you will have a more organsied looking directory with your links pointing to www.yoursite.com/go/pokerstars/ rather than www.yoursite.com/pokerstars.html. But however you choose to organise these redirects is completely up to you.

March 1, 2008 | General Affiliating, Tips and Tricks