If you are an affiliate and one of the brands you promote uses Post Affiliate Pro affiliate software, this tutorial will show you how to create direct links – even if the merchant hasn't set them up for you. For the past year I've been an affiliate of a brand that didn't fully set up their Post Affiliate Pro account. So the only link I had was the link to the home page of their website (not even to the store).
Read my List of Top Affiliate Marketing Software.Since it's much more effective to link directly to the product I'm featuring, I wanted to see if I could create a link myself. Many times when a merchant adds a new product, they don't add it to the list of affiliate links. So you need to create one manually.
As with most affiliate networks or software, a great benefit is that you can create a direct link to any product your merchant carries. It's not very clear that you can and so far I haven't seen instructions on how to do it. Yet it's very easy to do. It's just not obvious how.
So here goes…
First, login to your affiliate account and click PROMOTION on the left hand side column.
From there you get a dropdown menu. Select ADVANCED TOOLS. Note: I'm not sure why a direct link is an advanced tool. To me, it's quite basic and expected. That is how I went astray!
In this example I want to link to Purple's new power base, which is a remote controlled base for your mattress that has massage, adjustable positions and other features.
The URL is https://onpurple.com/powerbase
I plug that into the generator and click Generate code.
My affiliate tracking URL appears in the box below. I copy and paste that any time I want to link to the power base.
After I create the link I go to Pretty Links WordPress plugin and create a short link that I can remember and that I can track clicks to within my blog dashboard. In this case I'd probably make it www.newspapergrl.com/powerbase
There used to be a way to set it so any link from your site was an affiliate link, but I don't see that option. If you know of a way to do that, please comment.
