If you're using the Infusionsoft Affiliate module to drive referrals to your product or service, it'll be obvious to you that you're not going to get a whole lot of word-of-mouth referrals from your affiliates because no one is going to want to refer someone to http://appname.infusionsoft.com/go/redirect/affiliatecode. The URLs are just too long.

While working for our case study business All About Spelling last week, I came across an easy way to facilitate word-of-mouth referrals from affiliates. All About Spelling runs their website on the domain http://www.all-about-spelling.com. They also own http://www.allaboutspelling.com but they weren't doing anything with that domain. So, we decided to use allaboutspelling.com for word of mouth referrals.

Here's what I did:

In the root public_html (or www) folder of allaboutspelling.com I created an .htaccess file and Included these 3 lines:

Code: :

# Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^(.*) http://appname.infusionsoft.com/go/redirect/$1/simple_url [NC]

The # before Options +FollowSymlinks can be removed if you have errors.

You'll need to replace appname with your Infusionsoft account name and you'll need to replace "redirect" with one of your affiliate redirects. "simple_url" is added at the end so that you can track word-of-mouth referrals through this "simple url".

This allows All About Spelling affiliates to tell their friends to visit allaboutspelling.com/affiliatecode.

When the referred friend goes to that url, the .htaccess file parses out the affiliate code and sends the visitor through the actual affiliate redirect. No long URLs needed.

Now word of affiliates who refer mostly through word-of-mouth, don't need to remember a long URL.

I set up the same thing for Infusionsoft affilates at infusionsoftdemo.com. This domain will redirect to the demo page using your affiliate code like this: http://infusionsoftdemo.com/affiliatecode

Comments?

That's a hot trick, Tyler. Thanks for sharing.

Got a question, when doing the Rewrite on this, will it automatically perform a 301/302 redirect? Does this have any SEO penalties or benefits?


On a related note, when I want to refer people to a specific URL but want to keep it clean and functional, I basically just send them to new folder with an index.php which will perform a 301 redirect to my affiliate URL. The benefit in this, is that readers will be more likely that blog readers may click your URL if it's clean like "www.acme.com/infusion/" since it appears to imply it's located on one's Web site.

It's an easy way to solicit a higher CTR on content areas like blogs. I've seen a higher CTR and a higher "action" ratio by doing this. But definitely a mod_rewrite approach is more scalable.

Thanks,
Joe

Hmmmmm! Truthfuly, I'm not sure. I'm no expert at this stuff. You definitely want to redirect via 301 whenever possible. I think the code above uses a 301, but you could ensure it by changing the code to the following:

Code: :

# Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^(.*) http://appname.infusionsoft.com/go/redirect/$1/simple_url [R=301]

Hi Guys

Using a folder or file off the main site is one way to go but for small numbers of affiliates, say 30-40 it may be better to follow the sub domain method.

This is for instance how Yanick has set up Dan's Best ever offer thing.

Basically create a subdomain for each affiliate on your site. If you site is something notable like Dan's then its worth having his domain there. If not then using something generic and relevant may help. Such as smartdog.com for dog training.

Then you affiliates URL is bobhope.smartdog.com. That puts the affiliates name at the front and stops people taking the affiliate code off the end. You then redirect each sub domain index to the appropriate Affiliate redirect.

This then allows you to see extra web stats. It is also a great way to track other offline stuff like newspaper ads.

It is a nice clean way to do things. It also lets your affiliates have their name in the url.

Note, with all these systems you can also keep all of this in place once its set up and change the redirect in the background within Infusion.

That means your affiliates do no more work but you can direct where the client ends up. but make sure the affiliate knows that.