The Importance of Managing Your Affiliate Links - BobWP Monetizer Podcast

Today, it’s all about how critical it is to have something in place to help you manage, update and maintain your affiliate links as an affiliate marketer.

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On our blog, I have done past posts about managing your affiliate links. For affiliate marketers, this is so critical. While my posts have touched on the importance, I have mostly  talked about the tools. There are a few out there and I recommend Thirsty Affiliates myself. In fact, if you use WooCommerce for affiliate products, it works great with it as well.

When I’m talking about managing our affiliate links, this could be either or both: text links and banners. It really doesn’t matter.  What is more important is the number of links you have on your site. But even then, somehow managing those links, from 10 to hundreds of them, will help you stay away from future headaches.

As you can guess, with more than a thousand posts here on our site, we have a lot of affiliate text links scattered in posts. In fact, when I update older posts, if appropriate, I will add some new links there as well.

So What Do I Mean By Managing Your Affiliate Links?

You ma be thinking, okay, so I drop in affiliate links. They are scattered around my blog. I  don’t have any real intentions of removing them. So what the heck?

An Example of When You Need Affiliate Link Management

Here is a perfect example of what I am talking about.

I have one WordPress vendor in particular with several affiliates to several different products of theirs. Those are scattered and duplicated, likely, in dozens of posts. Well, at one point they changed their domain (URL) and as a result, all my affiliate links became broken. Of course they had redirects in place for awhile, so it wasn’t an immediate concern. But lucky for me, I was already using the Thirsty Affiliates plugin so all I had to do was go into each affiliate and change the URL. Sure, that was a little time consuming, but not nearly what I would have faced if I needed to track down each single post that had the link in it. It would have been nearly impossible to make sure each link got changed.

That is the single most important reason to have something like this in place.

Other Benefits of a Affiliate Link Manager

Of course, there are other benefits as well to using something like Thirsty Affiliates. The first is the nofollow link. This is something you typically want to set for all your affiliate links. And with a plugin like this, you can do it globally so each link you create is assigned the nofollow.

Secondly, it’s just easier. Once you have created the affiliate links, it’s easy to add it, either text link or banner, to any post via the post editor window.

So in the end, yes, if you plan on having any amount of affiliate links on your blog or site, best be prepared now than sorry later on. If you are just starting, you are ahead of the game. If you already have tons scattered on your blog, well, this will be one heck of a job to get it all in place. And although I wish I had an easy solution for that situation, all I can say is best of luck.

If you are curious about either the plugin Thirsty Affiliates or how to use it with WooCommerce, you can check out both posts here on our blog.

Till next time.

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