If you publish articles on EzineArticles like I do then you’ve surely come up against the “no affiliate links” rule. The rule doesn’t actually ban affiliate links outright, however. Here’s what the rule says:

You declare that you will not send in any articles with direct affiliate links in them. We reject articles with direct affiliate links. It is ok, however, forward/redirect to an affiliate link from the top-level of a domain name you own.

In other words, if you have a domain “foo.com” it’s OK to include a link (in the resource box only) to the URL “http://www.foo.com” or the URL “http://foo.com” if that URL immediately sends the visitor to an affiliate link. But you can’t link to any other page on the site that does the same thing — only the root page of the site is allowed this exception to the “no affiliate links” rule.

Why does EzineArticles have this rule? It’s about quality. A lot of sites that embed affiliate links in their pages are of dubious quality, and EzineArticles tries very hard to only link to quality sites so that it can keep its high page rankings. (The human-based vetting of articles that is central to its design is a big reason why EzineArticles is seen as an authoritative source of content by the search engines.) It also requires some effort and commitment on the part of the article author, who has to purchase a domain name to use as a forwarding service.

Easy Redirection With PHP

Your domain registrar can automatically forward any domain you own to a URL of your own choosing, but there some advantages to doing the EzineArticles-friendly domain forwarding yourself. And it’s not hard to do at all as long as your web hosting service supports PHP (which is pretty much everyone).

Let’s say I want to promote a ClickBank product called Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle, a very legitimate ebook about exercise and weight loss. I start by purchasing an appropriate domain, in this case feedthemuscleburnthefat.com (no, it’s not very creative). I want to set up the domain so that anyone who clicks on a link to feedthemuscleburnthefat.com is automatically forwarded to burnthefat.com using my affiliate link.

All I do is create a file called index.php using a text editor like Notepad. Four lines is all I need:

<?php
$afflink = 'http://egiguere.burnthefat.hop.clickbank.net';
header( "Location: $afflink" );
?>

I place this file on the web server and Bingo!, visitors get automatically redirected to the official Burn the Fat site.

You can do the same with your own site, just replace my affiliate link above (set in the second line of the script) with your own affiliate link.

302 vs 301 Redirects

The nice thing about the redirection method above is that it sends a “302 Moved Temporarily” redirection command back to the web browser and not a “301 Moved Permanently” redirection command. This difference is important. You’ve probably heard that you should use a 301 redirect whenever you move or rename a page so that search engines will update their indexes (and Google will pass PageRank). That’s correct, but this is not the time to do a 301 redirect. You want a temporary redirection.

Why? At some point in the future you may want to replace the forwarding with your own landing page. Any links that you’ve accumulated to the site will start passing PageRank to the new index page, not to the vendor’s page like it would with a 301 redirect. That’s why setting up your own domain to promote an affiliate product using a temporary redirect is an easy way to promote an affiliate product via article marketing without having to set up a “proper” site.

Conversion Tracking

It doesn’t take a lot of work to do a bit of conversion tracking with the PHP script shown above. ClickBank, for example, offers a “tracking ID” or “tid” feature. Here’s what ClickBank says about tracking IDs:

Tracking IDs are short descriptions you create that are added to the end of your HopLinks. The Tracking IDs can be up to 24 characters long, and must consist only of numbers and/or letters (no punctuation or other symbols). When a sale is made using one of your HopLinks, the Tracking ID is passed into ClickBank’s reporting, so you’ll be able to see exactly which of your promotional efforts led to the sale. Your Tracking IDs are visible only to you, so the vendor you send customers to won’t be able to view your Tracking IDs.

To use a tracking ID, just add “?tid=xxxxxx” to the end of your ClickBank affiliate link, replacing “xxxxxx” with the actual tracking ID.

Adding a tracking ID to the redirection script shown above is done by changing the second line of the script:

<?php
$afflink = 'http://egiguere.burnthefat.hop.clickbank.net?tid=ftmbtf';
header( "Location: $afflink" );
?>

Now when I get a sale for “Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle” I can look at the tracking ID column in the ClickBank reports and when I see “ftmbtf” I’ll know the sale came through my feedthemuscleburnthefat.com domain.

Next I’ll show you how to modify that script to make the tracking even more precise.

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