Pretend that you enter a niche and you want to be able to test the niche quickly and test multiple offers extremely fast in the niche, however, you worry about being hit with quality score issues if you just simply direct link to the affiliate URL you’re given. What should you do? In my opinion one of the best way to direct link is to simply buy a domain name and perform a 301 redirect on that domain name to the URL of the offer your promoting (your affiliate URL).
This task is actually quite easy to perform and hopefully this little post will explain to you exactly how step by step.
The most efficient way to perform a 301 redirect in my opinion is to use a htaccess 301 redirect. It’s extremely easy as well as quick to do!
Step One – Buying a Domain
Uh this is quite obvious, you need a domain to do this, so for the sake of this example we’ll say that I own the domain weightloss.com and will be using that domain name in order to 301 redirect to my affiliate offer I’m promoting. If you don’t have a domain…get one…again, duh!
Step Two – Creating the .htaccess File
The next thing you’ll need to do is open up Notepad (windows) or a similar program if you’re not using windows that will allow you to create a word document without adding any type of extra information to the file. Programs like Microsoft Word will add extra info to the document you save.
In Notepad you’ll need to enter the following code:
redirect 301 / http://www.affiliateurl.com/subid=example
The first part of this code tells your server that anything from the top level of this domain down should be 301 redirected. The URL is the URL that you want it to 301 redirect to. It’s really that simple!
Step Three – Upload to your public_html Folder
After you’ve created your file you need to save it with the file name .htaccess Make sure you put in the . at the beginning. After you’ve named it and saved it, you need to upload it to your “public_html” folder inside your ftp. It may be your “www” folder depending on your host.
Step Four – Make Sure you Test it!
The last thing you need to do is to make sure you test that it’s working properly. More than once I’ve setup a 301 redirect and didn’t check it only to find out hours later that I’ve been sending costly traffic to something that wasn’t even working correctly! Make sure you test it, even once you get use to doing it all the time, still check it every single time…get in the habit of checking it all the time now when you first start using it!
So as most of you know, the United States has finally admitted that we are indeed in a recession and President Obama announced that things will only be getting worse for us here in the United States! I personally know several families in our church that are now struggling because they’ve lost their jobs. So far, I believe that most online business have been unaffected by this recession and hopefully will remain so throughout it.
