Messy, ugly URLs have always plagued affiliate marketers. Those letters, numbers, and symbols at the end of a URL an affiliate marketer uses to direct traffic to a merchants’ website and identify him as the affiliate marketer who sent the traffic have always been a bit off-putting for our potential customers as well.

Now there’s a way to clean up your affiliate URLs and make them neater and shorter.

Learn how by watching this video:

Htacess Files Explained

NOTE: Even though Lurn, Inc. receives compensation for products and services promoted in our blog posts, we always give our honest opinions, findings, beliefs, or experiences about those products and services.

It’s really amazing how many affiliate marketers’ PPC advertisements, display ads, and landing pages don’t have a simple call to action anywhere in sight. The ads and landing pages look good. All of the right keywords are there. But customers have to search for a way to buy the product.

The ads and the landing pages don’t tell the customer exactly what to do! They don’t give the customer direction! Vague suggestions don’t work in advertising. The direct approach to advertising works!

What, Exactly, Is the Direct Approach?

Have you ever noticed that successful roadside businesses like fast food franchises use the direct approach to advertising on their billboards? It’s true. You see signs like “Try the New Whatever Burger!” “Claim Your Free Drink!” “Buy Two, Get One Free!”

Why do these successful roadside businesses use such a direct approach? They use the direct approach for two reasons:

State governments have seen their budgets dwindle as the world economy has dwindled over the last few years. In an effort to fill state tax coffers, several state governments (California, New York, Rhode Island, and others) have attempted to levy a state sales tax on affiliate marketers’ sales. But until now, all of the efforts have failed.

Colorado’s HB 1193 is a “rewrite” of an earlier bill that was defeated largely due to an organized effort by affiliate marketers in the state.

The rewritten version of Colorado HB 1193 doesn’t mention “affiliate sales” or “advertising tax” as did the earlier bill. But that doesn’t mean that affiliate marketers and the companies that produce the products sold by affiliate marketers won’t be affected.

They will be!

Everyone doing business in Colorado “by soliciting business from persons residing in this state and by reason thereof receiving orders from, or selling to such persons residing in this state” IS AFFECTED.

Every affiliate marketer worth her salt knows that users are much more likely (in fact, 80 percent more likely) to click on links in natural search returns than they are to click on the links in the PPC (Pay Per Click) advertisements that appear across the top and down the right side of search result pages.

The fact that clicks on links in natural search results are FREE makes it twice as important for you to get the best possible SEO placement for your affiliate website.

Obviously, the objective of all your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) endeavors is to get links to your website to display higher in natural search results for your target keyword/keyphrase queries.

You want to search engine optimize to the max!

Here are three suggestions to get the most out of your optimization efforts: