How to Easily Shorten and Track Affiliate Links

Keeping track of your affiliate links can be a pain, logging in and out of sites to get your links to share on social media or in blog posts.

Even if you're a little more organized than that and keep them in a spreadsheet, chances are they look something like websitename.com/rioavtroi4923804982elklgh669.

AKA, ugly and not something you can easily memorize.

Don't worry- we'll fix that right up.

Challenge: Convert at least five affiliate links into pretty-looking links!

Why: You can easily write up messages to promote your affiliate links when all you have to remember is blogclarity.net/tailwind versus http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?b=551332&u;=394419&m;=50947&urllink;=&afftrack;.

Plus, if you're talking about a product or service on video (like Facebook Live), it's so easy to say “just go to blogclarity.net/tailwind).” BONUS: You can also use it to make custom links for your email signup page.

How to Do It

Use this nifty little plugin called Pretty Links. It's only for WordPress (another reason to switch, eh?).

1. Download Pretty Links.

You can buy the paid version – Pretty Links Pro – if you think you need it, but I'm good with the free version for now. Pro does let you automatically add affiliate links to certain keywords on your site, which is pretty slick. Whichever you pick, download and install.

2. Copy the URL of an affiliate link you want to shorten.

If I have to tell you how to copy a link…. well, you know what you do here. On to the juicy stuff…

3. Click Add New Link from the Pretty Link Settings.

This will be in your WordPress navigation.

4. Then Click “Add Pretty Link.”

Easy.

4. Enter in the affiliate details.

This part can look confusing at first, but it's not bad! Here's what you need to do.

Redirection type: Select 307 if you're using an affiliate link. This one tells search engines the link may change and won't pass along SEO link juice. If you're using an affiliate link, you don't want link juice passed along as it can hurt your site rankings (it's essentially having a paid link– which is a big no-no).

Target URL: Paste the full affiliate link that you copied into this section.

Pretty Link: Name your link! Choose something really simple to remember.

Title: I just title it the name of the product or service I'm promoting.

Group: You can create groups of links, like categories. Good to do from the start if you're planning on adding lots of links. I set them up from the Groups tab because I couldn't get it to add new groups from this page.

SEO Options: If it's an affiliate link, always select no-follow.

Parameter Forwarding: I don't know what the hell that means so I skipped it. 🙂

Tracking Options: Do this so you can see how many times a link is clicked from your Pretty Links dashboard.

5. Click Update to save your link.

You can then click the clipboard underneath the link (see screenshot from step 4) and paste it wherever!

Boom! That's how it's done.

Easy, right?

What do you think?

Give it a whirl and let me know what you think!

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