Working With Affiliate Links

March 1, 2008 | General Affiliating

To make sure that every player you send to a poker website is tracked to your own site, you will need to use the affiliate links that the poker rooms provide you with. These links are pretty simple to use, as all you have to do is copy and paste the code onto your site and you are away.

However, if you are a complete novice when it comes to html, you may find it a little tricky to modify these links to exactly how you would like them. Some poker affilite programs make it a little scary to play with the affiliate links because of the “do not modify” notes placed next to each link, but as long as you know what you are doing then there is nothing to worry about. So here’s a quick guide to playing with those affiliate Links.

Affiliate Link Basics

A typical affiliate link will look like this:

http://www.pokerwebsite.com/index.htm?wm=123456

The 123456 part is your unique affiliate code, which helps to identify who sent the player through this link once it has been clicked. It will sometimes be a number, or it can be a combination of letters and numbers, but either way it’s what sets your code apart from the others and links it to your affiliate account. 

This is a pretty basic looking affiliate link, as some can have a few extra words and codes in the link to help track who sent the player, but they are all basically along the same lines as this. So if you see something like:

http://www.fulltiltpoker.com/?key=MDAwMDM5QjYwMDAwQjU0RDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDA-

Dont fear, its just the way the poker room tracks its affiliate links. You can still work with this in the same way as the link above, it just looks a little more complicated than most.

Extracting Affiliate Links

For some reason, some affiliate programs make it a little difficult to get your hands on the raw affiliate link that you can work with to add to your website. Some affiliate programs make it easy to get your hands on lots of fancy banners and anchor text links, but they don’t provide you with the basic affiliate link that you can use however you want. What I mean by this is the following:

Say I want to make a simple link to a poker website through my affiliate link, and I want to use “Play Poker Now” as the anchor text for the link. This is normally going to be easy enough, as all I have to do is write the anchor text out and place a link over the top of it. So I’m going to have something looking like this in the code:

<a href=”http://www.partypoker.com/index.htm?wm=2841382″ mce_href=”http://www.partypoker.com/index.htm?wm=2841382″>Play Poker Now</a>

This should be fairly familiar, as this will provide me with an afiliate link to Party Poker like this… Play Poker Now.

But sometimes I can’t easily find my basic affiliate link (http://www.partypoker.com/index.htm?wm=2841382) in the affiliate program backend. So I may need to look for it in one of the text link or banner codes that they have provided me with. For example, to get my affiliate link at Absolute Poker, I need to look at one of the text link codes and take the link out from there. The text link code for a certain anchor text looks like this…

<!– Affiliate Code Do NOT Modify–><a href=”http://www.absolutepoker.com/main.asp?host=a_77a_23954b_1384” target=”_blank”>Its All about Strategy<img src=http://affiliates.absolutepoker.com/processing/impressions.asp?btag=a_23954b_1384 width=0 height=0 border=0></a><!– End affiliate Code–>

The bolded part highlights where my affiliate link is, so all I have to do is copy and paste this and use it how I like. All the other code is for the anchor text and to help track impressions, so I can live without that and just use the affiliate code how I want. Although in this particular instance, if I wanted to use a different anchor text, I could just change the “Its All About Strategy Part” and I would still be able to track impressions with this link. But essentially, this is where you can get your basic affiliate link and use it over whatever images or anchor text you desire.

Not all poker affiliate programs make it a little tricky to find your basic affiliate link, so you may never have to do this. But at least you will know how to get a hold of your simple affiliate link if you can’t seem to find it anywhere on the affiliates page when you log in. The whole “Do NOT Modify” can scare people out of playing with the links, but it’s just there as a precaution.

It’ a good idea to click on your links a few times after modifying them and uploading them to your site, just to check if the clicks show up in your affiliate report to confirm that they are still working correctly.

Placing Affiliate Links Over Images

Just as you might place an affiliate link over some anchor text of your choice, you can place an affiliate link over an image just as easily. It really is just as simple.

So say for example you have an affiliate link like http://www.pokerwebsite.com/poker/123456/ and you want to place it over the top of some text. You would simply link it over the top in your webpage editor, and the code would would something like:

<a href=”http://www.partypoker.com/index.htm?wm=2841382″>Play Poker Now</a>

Now for an image, you just do the same sort of thing. All you do is place the link over the top of the image, and your visitor will be taken to the poker room through your affiliate link when they click on the image. So just place the affiliate link over the top of the image in your webpage editor and you are done. So the code will look something like this:

<a href=”http://www.pokerwebsite.com/poker/123456/”><img src=”image/your-image.jpg”></a>

And that’s all there is to it.

Useful Article: Find out how to change all affiliate links at once on your site.

March 1, 2008 | General Affiliating