Redirecting Affiliate Links Inside Rebrandable Reports and PDFs

Giving away free and rebrandable PDF reports are a great, time-tested method of acquiring free traffic. As people find them, read them and pass them around, your traffic, optins and sales grow. But there’s a common problem with PDF and Free Reports being made by marketers. The problem lies in their links.

The problem: most marketers aren’t redirecting the links in their reports. Instead, they’re using the straight affiliate link from ClickBank or some other marketplace. This is a big mistake. A lot of vendors on Clickbank end up getting closed or shut down. Once they disappear, so do all your distributed links and hard work. In order to resolve this issue, I’ve come up with a simple script you can place on your web host to redirect your affiliate links in Rebrandable PDF reports.

Instructions for Redirecting Affiliate Links in Rebranded PDF Reports

1. FTP into your website.
2. For the purposes of this tutorial, we will create a folder inside your root directory called “go“. You can name it anything you want.
3. Now, create a PHP file inside the “go” folder called “link.php“. You can name this anything you want, too. In fact, you can create multiple files for different affiliate products you’re promoting.
4. Inside the link.php file, paste the code below. I’m using a Clickbank affiliate link for the sake of simplicity. Be sure to replace vendor with the name of the actual vendor on Clickbank.

Now simply use the following link in your PDF reports…

http://www.yourdomain.com/go/link.php?aid=cbaffiliateid

Replace cbaffiliateid with your affiliate link at Clickbank.
Inside your PDF rebranding software, you want to make the cbaffiliateid the rebranding Affiliate ID.

The magic in this redirect code lies in the ‘.$_GET[‘aid’].’ part of the link. That’s where the aid variable in the original link gets extracted and placed into the redirecting affiliate link (which can be changed at any time).

Done. You now have an affiliate link in your PDF report that will never die because you can edit the link in your link.php file whenever you want.