Why you NEED an affiliate link management system
Elliot Schoenfeld · Published
If you've been creating for a while, your affiliate links are everywhere: years of captions, YouTube descriptions, blog posts, newsletters, and DMs. These links live forever and your audience has the expectation that they will go where they are supposed to. These small promises fall to the back of our minds, and most creators have no single place to see those links, let alone an easy way to change them.
What is an affiliate link management system?
An affiliate link management system is one place to create, track and change every affiliate link you share. Many times they come with features that allow you to create short links, or provide additional tracking.
By sharing a link created in a link management system instead of just the affiliate link you now have the control. This control ensures that you'll never share a broken link, you can swap your affiliate providers, and keep track of what links are actually performing; which are all core tenets of a successful affiliate strategy.
How is it different from a link shortener or a link-in-bio page?
- A link shortener makes a URL shorter, and are typically one aspect of an affiliate link management system.
- A link-in-bio page gives you one page of links for your profile. It doesn't help with the link in last year's blog post or a video description.
- A link management system covers every link, wherever you've shared it. A bio page can sit on top of it, but it doesn't replace it.
Why affiliate link management matters
Keep track of performance across every platform
Your affiliate dashboards tell you what each network paid. They rarely tell you which post, platform or placement did the work, and every network reports in its own dashboard, in its own way. Creators often are a part of many different affiliate programs; we at @schoandjo are a part of over 20 different programs. No one has the time to sift through 20 different reporting platforms just to see how my affiliates are performing.
Understanding performance is crucial as you can dial into what pieces of content are underperforming so you can make changes to fix them. Or you can see what affiliates are performing the best, and perhaps implement those strategies elsewhere.
Fix a broken link once
Products get discontinued, pages move, and stores restructure their URLs. If you pasted the affiliate URL directly, fixing it means hunting down every place you shared it, and some of those places may be hard or impossible to edit, like a printed QR code. This happens all the time and here are a couple examples:
- Our sunshirt we promoted is no longer sold.
- An affiliate program goes out of service and those links need to change.
With a link you control, you literally change the destination once and it is automatically updated everywhere. I'd say this is the prime reason to use an affiliate link management system, and with Creator URLs it starts at just $1/month!
Update your links when an affiliate program switches platforms
Brands move between affiliate networks, and when they do, your old links can stop paying you even though they still appear to work. For example earlier this year Etsy moved off Awin onto Rakuten and so our 15 links across our blog were in danger of losing their affiliate attribution. We were able to spend 5 minutes updating all those links and we never had to search through our hundreds of existing blog posts.
The same applies when you find a better commission elsewhere or replace a product you recommend! You're not beholden to your first affiliate program if they only offer 2%, and now you've been accepted into a program offering 10%! You update the destination, and years of old content starts earning under the new program.
What to look for in an affiliate link management system
- Editable destinations. Can you change where a link points after sharing it, and keep its click history?
- Performance by source. Can you see referrers and campaigns, not only a total?
- Bot filtering. Crawlers and link previews can inflate a click count. Does the tool try to exclude them?
- Pricing that doesn't punish growth. Does your bill go up with clicks, contacts or audience size? A post going viral isn't a paycheck yet.
- Affiliate tags left intact. Does the redirect deliver your full affiliate URL unchanged?
- Your own domain. Is it available if you want your brand in the URL, and at what price?
- A way out. Can you take your links and your numbers with you if you leave?
What's the best affiliate link management system?
We're biased, because we built one. We think the best choice for creators is Creator URLs.
It's made for creators
Creator URLs started as the tool we built for ourselves after years of creating. It wasn't adapted from something built for marketing teams, and the plans are priced for a creator who is still getting by.
It has a generous free tier
The free plan includes unlimited short links, unlimited clicks and a QR code for every link, plus click tracking with bots filtered out. We don't meter clicks on any plan, so your best day never becomes your biggest bill.
The tradeoff is that free links show a brief Creator URLs branding page before forwarding. Any paid plan removes it.
It solves each of these problems
| The problem | How Creator URLs handles it | Plan |
|---|---|---|
| Which platform is working? | Make one link per platform and compare click counts | Free ($0) |
| Which platform is working, in more detail? | Referrers, countries, date ranges and UTM tagging | Scale ($5/month) |
| A link broke | Change the destination in place and keep its click history | Creator ($1/month) |
| A program switched platforms | Point each affected link at the new program's URL | Creator ($1/month) |
You can start free and upgrade when you first need to edit a link. The links you've already shared become editable, so there's nothing to re-post.
It's also worth being clear about what it doesn't do yet: Creator URLs won't alert you when a destination dies, and a program switch means updating each affected link one at a time.
How to get started
- List the links that matter most. Start with your bio links, your top posts and anything printed.
- Create a link for each one. Use a separate link per platform if you want to compare them.
- Swap them into your highest-traffic content first. You don't have to migrate everything in one weekend. New content can start using them right away.
- Check your numbers after a month. TODO: what you look for when you do this.
TODO: closing line and call to action, linking to sign up.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need one if I only promote a few products?
Yes, we recommend starting with a good foundation. Stay on the free tier and then you're positioned to upgrade when your business demands require it.
Will a redirect affect my affiliate commissions?
No, redirects match your affiliate links exactly so everything is attached to the link you upload.
Do I still need an affiliate disclosure?
Yes. A short link doesn't change your disclosure obligations. Be sure to have an FTC disclosure before a user may click on your links.