If you’ve been around internet marketing for any amount of time you’ve likely heard the term affiliate redirects. What this refers to is the process of taking the affiliate link you’ve been given by the merchant, and using another URL to send visitors to their pages. There are several reasons you would want to do this, and they are all valid.

The first one is management. If you have a load of affiliate links all over the Web on various articles, forums, groups, videos and more, when that particular affiliate program either ceases to function, or changes out their links, you’re stuck with a bunch of dead links, and a LOT of painstaking work ahead of you. You’d have to go and find all your links that are no longer working, and change them out one at a time. Not fun!

If you are using an affiliate redirect with your .htaccess file you’d have all your links in one file, and changing them everywhere is a snap.

Another reason to use this strategy is to prevent commission theft. It’s not as common as many would have you believe, but it does occur now and then. Using affiliate redirects with your .htaccess file takes care of this nefarious activity as well.

Let’s take a look at how to set this up. Your .htaccess file is a simple text file that contains the redirect language. If you have a lot of them, or many sites, a best practice is to have a dedicated domain just for this purpose. This file can be the only thing live on the domain; you don’t have to have a live site, just this file in the root folder.

The file needs to be there on its own, and not in any folder. If you already have a .htaccess on the site you’re doing this for, you need to add the code to your existing .htaccess file. If you have a WordPress blog as your site, this will be the case. (Another reason to host your redirects on a site independent of anything else.)

Here is what the code looks like that you’ll put in this file to redirect your affiliate links, using a product called Simple PHP from Clickbank:

Redirect /simple-php http://2cb1a639n5-an90lqlrbjmpabu.hop.clickbank.net/

What this then does is redirect any link pointed to http://www.yourdomain.com/simple-php to the above affiliate link. Not only do you lose the ugly link Clickbank has given you, but should you need to change them in the future, it’s a one-step operation. And, you’re safe from commission thieves!

You need to get the code just so, however. The Redirect needs to be capitalized, and there needs to be a space between the word Redirect and the /simple-php, as well as one between that and the original affiliate link. Get any of that wrong by even one space and it won’t work.

Changing this practice can help save you work and make you more money down the road, when potential customers are redirected to your affiliate link to make a purchase they may otherwise have not been able to!