A beautiful day here today and perfect for the morning cycle commute into work.

Normally it's not much fun commuting in the winter but today is one of those exceptions and it looks like it might hold for the rest of this week. I hope so because the football pitches around here have been waterlogged and last Saturday was a close call.

This weekend we are up against Telford Juniors. Well when I say "we", of course I actually mean my eldest stepson who played his first game for impact united last saturday.

My days of playing football are long gone. Although if I keep up this cycling malarkey you never know I might make a comeback on the local green with the 10 year olds

And what a ruckus it was! Two sendings off, parents screaming at the opposing manager and all the usual stuff you get at grassroots football! Can't wait for Saturday to come again!

Go Impact! Promotion to the west midlands regional is a distinct possibility.

Whilst we are on the subject AFC Telford are starting to show the sort of form that could yet see them promoted from the Blue Square North. Congrats on another great away win last night. With the stadium we have here in Telford we should be playing league two football and not languishing in the BSN.

Anyway, you didn't come all this way to hear me yabber on about footie stuff did you?

Another soft goal again last night and Liverpool are really making a pigs ear of this season. I tried to get tickets for the boxing day game against wolves but no joy. Probably just as well the way they are playing.

Let's get on topic shall we?

So what possible reason could you have for not wanting to hide your affiliate links?

In the gaming industry the software used for affiliate tracking is in most cases very advanced. Way ahead of most other industries with the notable exception of several health companies at the forefront of slimming pills and men's health products.

The way that most affiliates work is lazy. If you are one of the many affiliates that just sticks with the default tracker (hands up you know who you are ) then you are missing the opportunity to do some serious tracking and fathom out exactly what is working on your site.

Let's take the casino site for example which we built back in the summer and is now just about ready for some serious promotional work.

Let's look at the main display:

What we are looking for here is to give the surfer maximum opportunity to click a link and lay down a cookie on their PC. This is why we give them two extra links in the review table as well as the "review" link. The other two links take them directly to the download software page.

What we need to know is which links are being clicked on. What is the surfer attracted to and why?

By utilising a number of different trackers we can assign a different tracking ID to each link so that when we come to run our affiliate stat report we can see which links are getting the most clicks.

As well as setting up these individual trackers we can also assign separate trackers to the review page:

Both the website address and the link at the footer of the review have separate tracking ID's so that we can see which link is drawing the most clicks.

This means that for just this one affiliate we have a total of five tracking ID's plus a separate one for the banner so that we can see how effective this is as well.

Now, if you simply redirect all of these links through a php script like /goto/index.php and lump everything through this script then it makes it nice and neat but you are not learning as much as you should from the click through's.

In the beginning of a sites life you need to learn what is working and what isn't as fast as possible because it's the key to making money from your site. Worrying about whether someone is going to try getting around your affiliate link is one of those things that you shouldn't be worrying about here.

Back in the day I used to go to great lengths to hide affiliate links but these days the value of what you learn by implementing proper tracking far outweighs the tiny amount of business you lose by trying to cover everything up.

Not to mention the amount of time it takes to do all of your hiding.

I'll agree that in some cases it might be prudent to hide an affiliate link and as you progress through your affiliate career you might develop your own in house system for handling all of your links - but for those starting out in affiliate marketing you should make full use of the full range of tracking systems available to you.

Storebuilder Blog - Affiliate Marketing