Now that you are monetizing your content with affiliate links, it begs the question if you are using “clean links”?

Rather than linking with your affiliate link url, which would look something like this:

http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?B=842462&U=235073&M=60575&urllink=

a clean “looking” link would incorporate the use of a redirect, and look something like this:

http://www.yourwebsite.com/go/coach-training-alliance.htm

Why is it important to link this way?

The original intent of using this method was to “cloak” the link so that it didn’t look like a referral link per say. Needless to say, if you have a disclaimer on your site, stating your use of affiliate links (which is an FTC requirement, btw), there really is no need to “cloak” is there?

However, there are several other benefits of clean linking:

1) It’s Clean. By clean, we mean there is no tracking code nor shareasale url, which doesn’t accurately foretell the destination of the link. By simplifying and including “coach-training-alliance” in the url, the landing page destination is more clear. In a way, you could say it’s more user-friendly.
2) Centralized Management. If you have multiple links of Coach Training Alliance spread throughout your site (which you should!), you would only need to edit one file to update all of your links at once.

Here is an authority source (Yoast) on the subject, also with a simple tutorial on creating and making use of a link redirect script.

For WordPress users, you can’t go wrong with the Pretty Link Lite Plugin. Simply download and activate the plugin and update your sites Permalink settings in the WP interface.

If you are not already redirecting your affiliate links, it’s time to start!