Random thoughts, invalid links, etc.
So...I'm going on 5 months with my first website. Well over 1,000 clicks on my links and no sales. :( Trying not to get frustrated.
I'm on 4 affiliate platforms - ShareASale, Rakuten, CJ and Amazon. I've been using the bit.ly shortener to shorten my links because I post a lot of affiliate links on twitter and facebook. I have gotten the "invalid link" notification from ShareASale a few times, so I emailed support about it. They told me this:
The links were most likely reporting "Link Code Error," which generally means that there is a parameter missing in your link. Since this isn't the format of the actual Affiliate links you'd get from the ShareASale interface, my guess is it was not a true click by a real user. Sometimes "clicks" can happen when a bot or web crawler visits your site to index it, or even when you add a link to social media that previews it by following the URL. In these cases, the links may be mangled, causing ShareASale to record an invalid link.In other words, these are most likely false alarms.
Then I asked about using a third part link shortener and they replied with this...
ShareASale never recommends the use of 3rd party link shorteners as we cannot guarantee tracking through them.
So I've searched WA for info/comment on negative effects of using link shorteners and having really found anything conclusive. Should I stop using bit.ly link shortener altogether for my links I post on twitter and facebook? If the click show up on my reports, should the platforms be able to track them back to me in the event of a sale?
And I should stop using bit.ly, does anyone know how to shorten a link on Raktuen after copying and pasting the section of code?
Any help is much appreciated as I await my first sale and hope I haven't been doing things all wrong for the past 4 and 1/2 months...thanks!
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The journey has just began keep going. Never stop you are lost there. Keep improving on your content and use of images with internal and external links. Congrats! 👍✨🌈 👍
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I'm the ShareASale representative here on Wealthy Affiliate, and I'm glad to follow up on that. Instead of using bit.ly, why don't you just use the link shortener available via the bookmarklet? You can just place the bookmarklet on your browser, then quickly create a shortened link that is guaranteed to work.
When you open the bookmarklet on the merchant page you wish to deeplink to, just click on the license plate button on the upper right for your shortlink.
thanks so much - that was very helpful! One more question - when getting the license plate link using the bookmarklet - is there a way I can get an image link to share on social media as well?
Actually there are quite a few options to create your own banner ad or image link within the Bookmarklet tool. You can choose any image available on the merchant's page, plus choose the presentation. It's really a pretty robust tool!