The Lazy Affiliate's Guide To Creating Deep Links

I'm lazy! No, I'm very busy and don't have a lot of time to research additional products and build links. In fact I was supposed to do this post yesterday as well as some client work. The problem is that I like to do everything correctly, so some times it pushes things back .

I spend most of my time writing content and finding new niches. So following on from my post about how Google has allowed me to make my affiliate business more streamlined, efficient, responsive and profitable, I thought I'd post about how I find products to link to and how I create them.

Unlike some, I don't spend ages reviewing commission rates etc. I do spend time getting to know merchants and can instinctively know (generally) if they'll convert. Perhaps it's something like what Malcolm Gladwell wrote in his book "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking"?

I don't like having my affiliate links visible to the search engines. They're normally fine if you have sites with a load of unique content, but I don't want to be at risk if they decide to tweak the dial a bit. So having them invisible via robots.txt and noindex, nofollow are essential.

So when I've written a load of content about a product I'll do it in a set way:

1) Use the Affiliate Window's ShopWindow service on central domain that I own. I'll search for the products and then build the links from that.

For example, if I was looking to find merchants for the "SanDisk Sansa Express 2Gb MP3 Player" I'd search for it on the domain and use their preformated deeplinks and drop them in my blogs.

However, if I was commenting on products coming out in the future, I'd link to a search results page.

The issue here is that if you work in markets that Affilaite Window don't have many feed merchants on board then you could have issues. Thankfully I work mainly in the toy / consumer electronics area and they do very well on it.

2) The second stage is to search for the product in Amazon and add a link to them. They generally convert like a dream and are a firm favourite of mine - despite having a quasi-session cookie.

3) I'll search for the product in Google and see which merchants appear in the natural results or are bidding. If there are any I like I'll take the effort to build links. If they're with POR, Webgains, Affilaite Future, they're more chance of getting a deep link than if they were with Buy.at and they'll have more chance than TD and they'll have more chance than if they were with CJ. It's just my generalised view of how easy it is to create deeplinks (balanced with other criteria I mentioned on the A4Uforum)

4) Sometimes I'll use widgets from Amazon or Affiliate Window, but they don't typically fit well in my templates (Awin are doing an additional size).

5) Sometimes I'll link to Kelkoo, but as I do targetted SEO, it is often far better for me to look at % sales than pseudo-CPC merchants.

So for me, I'm more likely to promote merchants on Awin within my niches because they make it very easy for me to link to their merchants. Sometimes I don't have a choice (like the other night trying to get my head round the deeplinking rules for Thorntons on buy.at), but I'll naturaIlly put some networks into a "if I really have to" category when it comes to monetising my posts.

5) That's why POR are up there with their Deeplink Generator. You simply find a merchant you want to create a deeplink for, drop the product url in there and it does the rest (expect for putting your own tracking id in).


6) I even went through a stage of using the Buy.at widget to search for products and then take the deeplinks out. That works too!

7) Although it doesn't convert them into SEO-friendly links (if that exists), the Affiliate Future "Shopping Search" still helps you find a wider range of links and shouldn't be ignored.


p.s. we've come a long way since Kevin Edwards emailed me asking me why I "don't like Affiliate Window?"