The birth of smarter affiliate linking

Then it hit me. Suddenly I realised that the same free DNS services that I was using to forward mail from my domain coolkiwi.co.nz to my user’s email accounts also provided the opportunity for me “cloak” my affiliate links using web-forwarding technology.

Let’s allow the implications of this sink in, shall we…

Everyone can tell when you are using an affiliate link. You lose your “branding”, the visitor is directed away from your site (maybe forever) and they will probably never come back. If your visitors do sign up from your affiliate link the first time they click on it you may earn some commissions. If they don’t then you have probably lost your chance to convert the prospective customer forever. Your visitor’s perception of your site may even be cheapened by the experience.

Why? Because, if your visitors remember anything, they will remember the brand of the website you referred them to, not your brand! Next time they will probably go direct to the home page of the brand you are promoting if they wish to sign up for the product or service which they are interested in. And you’ve just lost credit for the sale. All your efforts in referring the prospect in the first place have been in vain. The owners of the affiliate program pocket all the cash. You get nothing except a lost visitor.

Once I realised I could also use the same free DNS service I had already set up to forward coolkiwi.co.nz emails to any other email address worldwide – hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo!Mail – to people’s work email, I did some market research among my Cool Kiwi Webmail customers via a customer survey.

Overwhelmingly my users told me they would love to be able to replace their existing unwieldy email addresses with other email providers with a new coolkiwi.co.nz email address. Many of my free webmail users told me they would even be prepared to pay for such a service! Instead, I offered the service to them free.

I’d suddenly realised that the same DNS service I was using to forward email sent to coolkiwi.co.nz could also be used to forward website addresses and (gasp) to cloak my affiliate links using my own domain names. And that I could also specify my own title, keyword and description meta tags for my affiliate links to these “cloaked” pages. So the search engines would index my affiliate links at my domain name and not the affiliate program owner’s keywords and home page.

For example, for a subsequent domain name I bought, NZFriendFinder.com, I went on to set up various top-level domains which forward to my various affiliate dating links. So instead of linking to https://passion.com/go/g551424+reg for example I set up a top-level domain name such as https://passion.nzfriendfinder.com with appropriate cloaked keywords. I retained the brand, the keywords and (hopefully) the sale. The name that would stick in the mind of my visitors would be “NZFriendFinder”, not whatever dating affiliate site I was promoting at the time. And the customer (hopefully) would return to NZFriendFinder once they were ready to sign up. Meaning? I kept the visitor at my branded domain and also kept credit for the sale.

[Editor’s note: Before doing this, check the affiliate agreement. Some affiliate merchants allow URL forwarding, some don’t. Some vendors see it as a clever technique, some feel that allowing it would weaken their brand. Also, if you plan to use a trademarked name as part of a domain name you’re buying, get permission first from the trademark owner.]

I started to get additional traffic through my own links instead of only referring links away to other sites. Whereas standard affiliate links would either be ignored by the search engines or simply count as links direct to the service I was promoting, now I was promoting my own brand, while also promoting affiliate sites. I could also sign up new affiliates below me using my own top level links, for example https://affiliate.nzfriendfinder.com which links directly to the FriendFinder affiliate program sign-up page but is cloaked with my NZFriendFinder meta tags.

I hope you find this tip regarding smarter affiliate links helpful and I wish you great success in your own affiliate marketing efforts.

It’s not my purpose in this article to make any recommendations on specific DNS services to achieve the results I’ve described. There are various DNS services available that can achieve these results.

If you would like to ask me any questions about how you can duplicate my smart affiliate linking methods for the affiliate programs you promote, you are welcome to contact me here https://contact.coolkiwi.co.nz and I will respond personally to all emails received.