I call this advanced because too many experienced readers miss the nuances of affiliate links. And it’s important to get the nuances.
An affiliate link is a hyperlink that has a tracking code attached to it for the purpose of paying the author once an event occurs. The event could be anything from just clicking through, to clicking with a successful application (a Conversion). It is easy to spot an affiliate link because the payment channel is often managed by a third party.
Credit Card affiliate links
Most credit card affiliate links are issued by LinkOffers (it has sister companies of CardSynergy and Creditcards.com) another player in the space is Credit Karma.
You might just see the stripped down part: http://track.linkoffers.net/a.aspx?foid=22894273&fot=9999&foc=1 this link can be added anywhere, such as to pictures to make widgets and whatnot.
How it might appear in text:
<bollocks_template> Lorem Ipsum AMAZING DEAL ALERT blah pfft Premier Miles & More® World MasterCard® get it now Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Donec quam felis, ultricies nec, pellentesque eu, pretium quis, sem. Nulla consequat massa quis enim. Donec pede justo, fringilla vel, aliquet nec, vulputate eget, arcu. In enim justo, rhoncus ut, imperdiet a, venenatis vitae, justo. </bollocks_template>
How it might also appear in text:
<bollocks_template> Lorem Ipsum AMAZING DEAL ALERT blah pfft Lufthansa Card get it now Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Donec quam felis, ultricies nec, pellentesque eu, pretium quis, sem. Nulla consequat massa quis enim. Donec pede justo, fringilla vel, aliquet nec, vulputate eget, arcu. In enim justo, rhoncus ut, imperdiet a, venenatis vitae, justo. </bollocks_template>
PC owners have an edge in spotting links
I have found that on the PC if I hover over a link the destination URL shows up in the bottom left corner of the screen, if it starts with track.linkoffers… or if it starts with creditkarma.com…then you have an affiliate link. I haven’t noticed this on a mac, maybe it shows elsewhere?
Pretty Links – a wonderful tool for bloggers
Pretty Link is a plugin that creates neat 307 (temp redirects) that look pretty. An example of a pretty link would be Premier Miles & More® World MasterCard® the beauty of Pretty links is that if you use this one simple URL (in my case I used saverocity.com/lufthansa1) for all links relating to the Premier Miles & More card then one update to the Pretty Link page changes every link on your blog, try it out:
Hover the mouse over the link, it won’t say track.link….
Click the link, it will flash track.link for a moment in the url address bar of your browser
Signup for 7 of these! (I’m kidding! Actually, this is my active link, but I think its pretty crap so don’t do it!)
Pretty Link Application
As I mentioned, just changing one line of code changes EVERY link on your blog with that /lufthansa1 link.
Now, ask yourself something expert reader. When a blogger writes about an inferior offer, and fills the post with inferior links, how do they do it?
Yep – that is right, the first thing they do is change the pretty link to the new affiliate offer, then they make up some <bollocks> post, fill it with pretty links, and that post and all others that ever talked about the Lufthansa card (or the recent inferior 50,000 United Card) become their latest affiliate links.
What happens when they get called on it?
Nick from PF Digest recently called out a number of bloggers for posting an inferior link for the Chase United card, I then thought it amusing to leave comments on the blogs of BoardingArea who were pumping this card, linking to Nicks post.
Funny thing… there are good bloggers and bad bloggers. A reader on Twitter asked me why after Nick and I made a fuss about calling out the inferior link I didn’t go on to ‘high five’ the good bloggers.
Pssst – want to know a secret?
The bad bloggers just didn’t acknowledge my comments, some deleted them before they were published, some approved the comment but ignored them and didn’t update the post.
The good bloggers – they ‘updated’ the post with a link to better offer.
But they didn’t use pretty link to do it.
What that means is they decided to give the appearance of looking after the reader, by adding in a single better link. Weird huh? If there is an affiliate link (that pays a commission) the first thing they do is update their pretty link. But if they are called out on crappy links, they (if they are the good guys) don’t go anywhere near their affiliate pretty link.. and what does that mean?
The original post now has say 5 links in it, 4 to the inferior offer, and 1 to the better one. The site in general has perhaps 10,000 links to the inferior one (with good SEO to bring people in) and 1 link to the better one, with no SEO.
Go look up your good guys, and let me know if you find one that ‘did the right thing’ and ‘looks after their readers’ that is linking to the better offer that they know full well about. Now you know how to do it, just hover, look out for the pretty link, and if it goes to track.link…. then its an affiliate link.
Think.
Disclaimer – I used my own old links in this post, don’t actually sign up for this card.