When websites disappear…
The CIOB situation is a timely reminder of why you should NEVER post your standard affiliate links as-is, and instead you should always use a shortener or tracker of some sort.
As long as you use some sort of redirection link, when a site does a disappearing act like this, you can edit your tracking link and at least know that you’re still going to get those visitors to another offer.
If you post your actual affiliate link in hundreds of different places, you need to revisit every single one of them to update it. Or more likely… you never get around to it, you lose all that traffic and all that work is wasted.
In this case, I’ve just updated my CIOB links in my trackers & redirection apps to point to EzBannerz.
Most of my CIOB links are banners, so people clicking through will obviously see its a different site, but the content is close enough they should at least consider it.
I’ve actually got too many sites I use for redirection and tracking… and I really need to spend some time to get them all onto one platform… but even so, it only took about 20 minutes to update everything, and now my links across hundreds of different websites are all working again!
If you’re not already doing this, it’s never too late to start.
Option #1. Leads Leap has a free link tracker that gives you a lot of valuable stats. I mostly use it for any paid ad campaigns… to check the traffic quality… but also I love the option to put an ad bar across the top of a page when the link is clicked.
The downside of these links is that they’re complicated… strings of random characters… so I tend to only use them for special purposes. For my day-to-day links there’s a much easier option…
Option #2. Pretty Links is WordPress plugin you can install on your blog so you can redirect everything through that domain. Best of all, you can use whatever text you want in your links, so they’re easy to remember and you don’t have to go looking them up all the time.
For example, I use Pretty Links on NoBSIM… so anything you see that looks like https://ezsitez.com/cryptos101 is a tracked link. I use a consistent naming pattern for my links, so I can easily remember them and rarely need check.
And I’m in the process of moving ‘everything’ to this site, so once done, I’ll be able to change one link here and have it update everywhere in an instant.
Worth noting, that one above is not an affiliate link either!
It points to a download I give away in all sorts of places, so I Pretty-Link it and now I can type it out, off the top of my head, any time I spot a new place to list it.
I use Pretty Links for downloads, and websites or pages or sites I share on a regular basis, complicated login pages I use regularly and ANYTHING I might ever need to access when I’m away from the office and my own computer/bookmarks!
Check it out sometime and you’ll wonder how you got by without it!
