One of the best tools for affiliates just recently got better. AvantLink made some significant changes to the Affiliate Link Encoder tool that they released a year ago. If you own a blog or forum and haven’t put this tool to use, I highly recommend using it today. For those that already has it implemented, you don’t have to change a thing. It is full backwards-compatibility with the original version of the tool.
Here are the improvements AvantLink have listed on AvantLink's Blog:
- The ALE now supports the encoding of plain text (a.k.a. “keyword encoding”) in your page content. Previously, only pre-existing direct links such as www.toolking.com would be converted to affiliate tracking links. Now, it’s possible to configure the ALE to not even require an existing direct link to the merchant: instead, it can operate simply on the mention of the merchant.
- Now you may be thinking: “What about all of my pre-existing links - I don’t want those rewritten!“ Don’t worry, we’re not going to completely mangle your page: keywords that appear inside existing links are left alone.
- With keyword encoding turned on, the ALE will (by default) automatically look for the name or URL of any of your active merchants in page content, and turn those into trackable links. You can override this default behavior by choosing which, if any, merchants should be encoded for a given ALE deployment.
- You can also specify completely custom keyword/key-phrase associations to encode.
- You can even specify certain pieces of text that should not be encoded as affiliate links; some people call these skip-words.
- We’ve added the ability to specify some CSS/formatting for your encoded links. Built-in options include adding a “title” tag of “This is an affiliate ad link.”, a double-underline format, or even specifying a custom CSS class name to use for all of the links. You can mix & match these options too, to further customize your setup.
- Lastly, when you use the ALE tool now you actually create a subscription/configuration entry. This allows you to make changes to your ALE deployment without going back through all of your pages to update the javascript include. It also allows some more advanced reporting on our end, such as which of your ALE subscriptions a particular click-through or sale resulted from; for keyword encoding our reports will even show which word or phrase was clicked on, leading to a particular sale.
To get started, just go to the “Tools” page of your affiliate account and click on “Create a new ALE subscription”. You'll wonder how you ever managed your blog/forum without this tool.
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