Here’s a little bit of advice you may be interested in if you produce any form of viral marketing publication. You know the sort of thing: ebooks, pdf reports, courses, reviews, etc.

Never use any link inside the content that you can’t control or change later.

You should always use redirect links from your own domain when putting any kind of link inside your ebook or publication. Most people will insert their affiliate link for a product or service inside their ebook that they are hoping readers will click on and earn them some cash.

Big mistake!

They can easily become obsolete, unusable and therefore unprofitable.

For example: If your affiliate program owner decided to no longer use Clickbank to handle his affiliate program and went with a different affiliate tracking link, what happens to the thousands of copies of your ebook that are in place with his old affiliate link in there?

Or suppose you are linking to a dating service that goes out of business? What then? I’ll tell you what then:

Your links are toast!

They are worthless to you.

Instead, you want to link to a page at your site that refreshes and redirects the visitor to your assigned affiliate link. Something like this: http://www.yourdomain.com/offer.html

This enables you to change the link anytime you want to in the future, you remain in control regardless of what happens with the products and services that you linked to. With a redirect link set up like this you can easily adjust a landing page, or send the traffic to a new affiliate link, or a different dating service, or to a sales/squeeze page at your site.

Even if you change hosts or servers you still remain in control. It would be impossible to make changes to all of those ebooks already out there. You simply make a two-minute change at your website. You would be amazed at how many dead links there are in the thousands of earlier ebooks still out there that could still be paying their authors a residual income.

The other downside is that you’re going to get plenty of emails from people saying, ‘You’ve got a dead link here, can you give me the correct one?’ It creates a lot of extra work in answering emails and is certainly throwing away potential profit from the countless people who never bother to ask for an updated link.

So be smart, never use any link inside the content that you can’t control. Always use redirect links and your product will be earning for you in years to come.