Know More About Dynamic Affiliate Linking

One of the best ways of getting targeted traffic to your website is through affiliate programs. This basically means that you sell third party products using an affiliate program. There are several programs like that available over the internet like Amazon’s affiliate program, Commission Junction, Orbitz, legalzoom.com and many more.

The normal process involves an affiliate link on almost all the pages of your website but this might be a waste of Page Rank for your website. So what is the best option? The best option is dynamic affiliate linking! Dynamic affiliate linking is considered to be a win-win situation for the website owner as well as the company whose products you are marketing. But before we move forward, you need to understand how to track internet traffic.

There are two technical processes involved in this; one is called the cookies and the other is sessions. Sessions is used rarely and the one company that uses it is Amazon. What sessions really do is encode the tracking information within a query string that is visible on any browsers location bar. But the majority of affiliate linking program use cookies, which are small text strings sent by a server to the browsers. The browser on the other hand will save them in the user’s computer. Next time when the user will visit the website, the same cookie will be sent back to the server and this is how tracking is done.

So now that you know how to track visitors on your website, it is time to test the dynamic links. This is important and you should ideally do it before launching your website because you wouldn’t want to have a broken affiliate link, which can be a serious problem later on. Here is an example of a dynamic affiliate link:

a href=”http://wwwqksrv.net/click-1180946-546790″ target=”_blank”
onmouseover=”window.status=’http://00laptops.com’;return true;”
onmouseout=”window.status=’ ‘;return true;”
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img src=”http://wwwqksrv.net/click-1180946-546790″ width=”1″ height=”1″ border=”0″

The first code is the affiliate referral code and the second one is the impression tracking code.

Once you have the dynamic affiliate linking code in place, you need to set the browser so that it can prompt you for accepting any cookies. If you are using IE6 then do the following:

Tools>Internet Options Menu>Privacy Tab> Advanced Button>Check override automatic cookie handling>select prompt for both first party and third party cookies> Click okay

Now whenever the server sends any cookie, the browser will prompt. Once you have completed testing of the links, you can reset the browser preferences.