Promoting products where you earn a comission when someone buy the product is a great business. It is called affiliate marketing and there are a lot of people that generate full time income trough this ( count myself too ). In theory, it is very simple: pop up some posts promoting products, add sidebar links and banners, get visitors to your site and wait for the money. Well, in practice, there are a lot of issues that appear in this simple process. One of the issues is when the links you used are not working anymore, what to do then ?

Here are the reasons why links stop working:

  • The product is not available anymore
  • The merchant switched the network.
  • The product was updated
  • The merchant is closed.

 

If suddenly you find out that some links are not working anymore, you can only go and replace all those links. It is not easy but you don’t have other option.

What you can do is to set-up your site so that you can quickly change the links. For this you can use a simple affiliate links manager plugin, or even a link cloaker plugin. How ? Affiliate link managers will let you manage and cloak your links. When you add a new link you select the cloaking url that will redirect to the merchant site. Add the cloaked url whenever you need. When a link will stop working then you can go to that plugin and replace the links once and it will work for every post where that liks is present.

Plugins you can use: