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.

As I’ve outlined in a tutorial ( ), the best practise is to create a landing page pre-selling the vendor’s product and containing the affiliate link.

Then our 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?