Why You Should Use Pretty Links
Summary
it's a bad idea to use affiliate links in monetized blog posts, as the post can be penalized by both search engines and autoresponders. There are two solutions to this. The easiest one is to substitute Pretty Links for your affiliate links. The other is to create Landing Pages that link to your vendor, either by affiliate link or Pretty Link and then have your blog post link to your landing page.
Avoid Linking Directly to Vendors
You write a blog post that gives a favorable review to a product that you’re an affiliate for.
Where do you put the affiliate links that will credit you with the sale?
The easiest thing is to put them in the blog post, right?
It’s also the wrong thing!
The search engines Google, Bing and Yahoo will penalize you. They see blog posts containing links to a vendor’s site as trying to make a sale, rather than inform searchers. And in fact, they’re right, aren’t they?
In addition, if you email your list, your autoresponder will give you a lower deliverability for emails containing an affiliate link.
The best practise is to create a landing page pre-selling the vendor’s product and containing the affiliate link.
Then your blog post reviewing the product links to the landing page, so it’s seen by the search engines as an internal website link.
But if it’s early in your internet marketing journey, building a landing page may not yet be in your skill set. It’s hard enough writing a product review blog post, yes?
Enter Pretty Links
Many people see Pretty Links as simply a method of turning a long, complex URL into a shorted, simpler one.
And while it is that, more importantly, it turns a link to an outside website into one based on YOUR website.
So that, for example,
https://yourvendorswebsitecom/affiliatestuff/789$32bfg/this... might become
Note that not only is the link much shorter and, well, “prettier” but as far as a search engine is concerned, it’s an internal link within your own website.
So, you can use the generated pretty link in your blog post and anyone clicking on it will be taken to your vendor’s site via your affiliate link.
OR
If you use a landing page, you can replace the link on the landing page with the pretty link, while your blog post points to the landing page, giving you double the credibility.
How to Install and Use Pretty Links
Pretty Links is a plugin, so you find and install it like any other plugin:
Search for the Plugin
Install the Plugin
Click on the Install Now button and wait a few seconds for the plugin to install.
Activate the Plugin
Once the plugin has installed, click on Activate.
New Pretty Links Menu Item
Pretty Links will then appear as a WordPress menu item and you can convert as many internal or external links as you like.
Add New Pretty Link
To create a new Pretty Link, click on Add New, either from the Pretty Links page or from the WordPress menu.
You can give the new Pretty Link a title, but if you don’t it will often derive one from the URL being linked to. The title is only used for you to recognize the various links once you have a few.
Enter the target URL. This will be your vendor’s affiliate link.
The Pretty Link is already shown, comprising your website’s URL, followed by a / and 4 letters or numbers.
Click the Update button to create the Pretty Link. The button label will change to “Publish” briefly.
Using the Pretty Link
After you Publish the Pretty Link, it will appear in a list of links.
Click on the copy icon next to any Pretty Link in the list.
You can then Paste it wherever you need to link to your vendor via your affiliate link.
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Extremely useful info. Thanks for sharing!!!
My pleasure, Dan.