Your preferred format for affiliate URLs
 

Hi everyone. What's your favorite format for affiliate links on your page? I'm working on a WordPress plugin and I'm looking for some feedback on what's useful to webmasters.

So, if your blog is called "my-own-blog", would you like your affiliate link to "super-program" to show up as... (See poll!)

Let's suppose for simplicity that all of those options lead to the exactly same URL at the end and keep statistics and whatever. So this question is only about the formatting. Thanks for your feedback!

super-program.com/join?magic=yes

I hoped this would get more answers. I'm fiddling around with a WordPress plugin where you just write "#affil" as your URL and the link gets automatically replaced with the correct one, coming from a database, based on configurable post metadata. For example, if you had tagged the post with "www,example,com", or maybe the post is filed under "example,com" in "sites" taxonomy, or maybe there's a custom field that says "site: example,com", the #affil links get rewritten to www,example,com/whatever?ref=username. (Sorry about the commas in URLs, the system won't let me post anything that looks like an URL for now!)

Hey. I voted. I know I'd probably prefer

"my-own-blog.com/go/super-program"

It would probably result in more clicks by "tricking" the viewer into thinking it's just another part of the site they are on when they see the url that shows up when they hover their cursor over the link.

Some may be savvy enough to spot referral links, which they know will take them to a pay site signup page, which they'd then avoid.

I think there is a already plugin called Affiliate Link Cloaker or something similar that does what you're proposing.

Thanks for your comment, I know about the Affiliate Link Cloaker plugin but it's main functionality is replacing certain keywords with affiliate links. I don't want this to happen: in my understanding, the affiliate programs demand that you don't promote other's sites on pages with their content, so for one, getting someone else's link inserted in a post with content by another would be bad. Additionally, I'm looking to insert links also in images, not just in text. So my idea is that when you're uploading an image and you choose which URL to link it to, you just type "#affiliate" and the proper URL gets replaced there based on the tags, categories, taxonomies or custom fields set on that post. The "cloaking" part is actually a piece of cake.

I use Pretty Link.

Yeah, Pretty Links is the plugin I was thinking of. I also use SEO Smart Links.