Wanted A Moan About Deeplinking But Darn It POR Has A Solution

When you're spending ages doing product reviews having networks that make it easy for you to do it generally means that affiliates will lean towards using your network (all other factors being largely equal).

Despite Amazon being a pain in the backside for creating links as I need two windows open, I still use them to a degree.

I moved over to using the Awin Shopwindow service [now on V2 with Get Vis] as it helps me find products their merchants have and create deeplinks. The benefit was that I could go through a product category and do 10 product posts in an hour and have tracking links that Google wouldn't crawl - perfect I thought.

But then I realised that I don't know what was the source of the purchase as the clickref defaulted to swinDOTcom so I couldn't track which page delivered the sale. Then I did a search on the mighty G and found this page where Confuscius had come up with a solution. I've tested it with a Maplin link and it appears the product name was carried through :D



So that was a result! But it should really of been done like that from the outset. However, I don't want to rely on Awin for the majority of my sales (no offence) so started to think of what other networks do and what would be my perfect solution.

The last couple of days I was thinking about that Firefox plugin which can automatically change any website you visited with a set script. I.e. change the Amazon logo when you were in there, or do some other wicked stuff. Then I thought "wouldn't it be ace if a network would give you a plugin so that whenever you visited a merchants site it would automatically give you your affiliate tracking link direct to the page you were visiting?" Then I wondered about if it could also give you an image link specific to your requirements i.e. it was hosted on a central server? So if I was doing some product research and found myself at Firebox, for example, at the top of the page there was a thin bar that would give me my affiliate link to that page and a 200 wide image links. I'd be able to wrattle off product posts ten to a dozen!

Anyways, whilst updating my Christmas blog I thought about adding some kiddy Christmas presents and found myself at Paid On Results to add some Wicked Uncle products. Now for some reason I always always click "Deep Link Creator" in their nav. Don't ask me why. Anyway, I saw the "Deep Link Generator" and this time I clicked it. Basically is a JavaScript that you can save to your browser and when you're in a merchant site you can click on it and it'll automatically create the tracking link!











Cool hey?

It may not put as much lead in my pencil as my ideal solution, but it's a long way better than having to log in, find the deeplink creator, select the merchant etc etc that you have to with the other networks. Simply do your product research, click a button and you've got a product link for you to promote them with. Bootiful!

Now I've finally started to get to grips with Affilistore with my cheap 2009 calendars site. When I can get rid of the footer by upgrading I'll be rolling it out to other niche sites, and eventually set them up on domains I'm doing nothing with.