LinkTrackr Is Must Use Software For Affiliate Marketers

LinkTrackr describes itself as a link cloaking and tracking software. I think in the internet marketing industry the word “cloaking” has negative connotations, but for affiliate marketers, this is a good thing. If you’ve ever signed up for an affiliate account somewhere, you’ve probably noticed that they give you long, ugly URL’s. They might have numbers, id’s, and often look a little sketchy. This is why you want to cloak your links.

Usually I set up redirects in my htaccess file so that my affiliate links look something like alexjuel.com/friendly-url which is much easier on the users eyes. You’re probably posting your links all over your site and on Twitter, guest blog posts and other places, so if your real affiliate link changes you can easily fix it in your htaccess, instead of trying to figure out where you posted that link all over the internet. And if you can’t update it or remember where you’ve posted it, you’re going to lose commissions.

In Linktrackr, you can set up your links to redirect through the linktrackr.com domain, so for example the link would look like http://alexjuel.linktrackr.com/any-name-here. You can enter your long, ugly affiliate URL to cloak or you can use a URL from your own domain, such as any you’ve set up in your htaccess file already.

What makes this really cool though, is that once the link is set up in Linktrackr, you can track all of your affiliate links from whichever programs you’re in. You can group them however you’d like, for example I’m going to group mine by niche. Maybe you’d like to group by affiliate program. I’ve only just signed up for a free account to test out the service but if you upgrade you can also split test URLs and do conversion testing.

This is great stuff.

Once your links are added, Linktrackr will begin to collect stats and will show you things like how many clicks you’ve received, how many clicks have converted (if your link converts to a page on your own site), referrers, browser stats, and split test results.

If you want to add a viral bar to your website, they can help you with that too. The free account only gives you limited customization, but a pro account will give you more options. Other than being able to remove the LinkTrackr credit from the viral bar, I’m not sure what other options you get. With the basic account though, you can choose from two themes, you can change the colors of the background and the link text, you can change font styles and you can choose which social networks you want to show in your viral bar. You can also show a disclosure policy link.

They also have a WordPress plugin. The WordPress plugin will show you the links you’ve already set up in your Linktrackr account. You can’t add new tracking links through the plugin, but you can set keywords to those links, which will then go back through any of your old posts and add links where those keywords show up. If you choose a keyword such as “email marketing” and that phrase shows up several times on a post, you can also set the plugin to link as many times per post as you’d like. It can link all instances or just once for example.

What I like most about the whole service is that it’s going to help me be more organized. I’m not great at tracking my affiliate links and I’ve signed up for affiliate programs in the past which have links I’ve completely forgotten about. I think LinkTrackr will help me keep track of this stuff much better.

Lastly, the prices

• Standard account (100 links) is $9 a month
• LinkTrackr Pro (500 links) is $17 a month
• LinkTrackr Xtreme gives you unlimited links for $27 a month

All upgraded accounts provide full stats and reporting and priority support.

They have an affiliate program too, so if you like the service you can promote it yourself and make some money in the process, which is why I’ve added it to the sidebar of my site. I’d appreciate it very much if you signed up through my link – even if it’s just the free account. 😀

Note: This post was created for the LinkTrackr February 2011 Contest where you stand a real chance to win a brand new Apple iPad 64G with 3G + Wifi worth $839.