What To Do If Your Links Don’t Work Anymore

Recently, I was putting together a presell page for a product I was promoting. I had done a few articles and blog posts in the past, and wanted to add to my efforts. For some reason, when I added the article to my blog I decided to click on the link to the merchant’s site.

Everything looked good. I was at the proper sales page. I clicked on the order link to make sure that the link was working and that I was being credited with the sale. But when I got to the order page, I got a message that the product was no longer being sold on clickbank.

This could have been a big problem. After all, I had a few articles and blog posts that had a link to that very product. But I use redirect pages. Instead of editing all of the documents, I was able to make a change to one page on my site, upload it to my hosting account, and all was well.

Redirect pages are pages whose sole purpose is to send someone to another page when you don’t want to link directly to that page. A good use for them is when you are using affiliate links. The links you get can look pretty ugly, and it can make it easy for someone to bypass your link, resulting in you losing out on the commission.

What you do is create the page you want to use to redirect to another web page. For example, let’s say you want to sell Blogging To The Bank. You could create a web page called “bloggingtothebank.html” as your redirect. Or you could shorten the link in any way you wanted. You could call it “blogging.html” or “bttb.html”. It doesn’t really matter what you call it, just so you remember where it redirects to.

Now you write an article about blogging, and at the end of the article, or even in links inserted into the article, you send them to the page you created. Maybe “www.yoursite.com/bloggingtothebank.html”, or “www.yoursite.com/bttb.html”.

Even if someone sees the actual web address, they won’t be able to see your affiliate link. Once they click on the link and get to your redirect page, they are immediately sent on to the sales page.

Redirects are good at masking affiliate links. What makes them even better is when an affiliate link isn’t valid anymore. It could be that the product isn’t being offered anymore, or that the merchant went to another payment processor or a different affiliate software. In those cases, you can still promote the product, but if you used your old affiliate link instead of a redirect, you have to go back and edit all of the documents you have on your site. If you submitted your articles to any directories, you’re out of luck. There’s no way to go back and fix those articles.

You can do what I did. I found another product that was very similar to the one that I had been promoting. I took the affiliate link I got from the new product, and put it in place of the old one on my redirect page. I uploaded the new page to my hosting account.

Two things to remember here. One is to be careful if you decide to use affiliate links to promote with. Two, take the time to test your links so you can find out if they still work. If I hadn’t clicked on the link, I wouldn’t have known that there was a problem. And I have no idea how long the link hasn’t been working. So test your links on a regular basis.