If you’re a TLA Publisher (aff), then you should have gotten the same email from TextLinkAds the other day.
TLA is moving all affiliate links from the old format to the new tinyurl.com format.
As a Text Link Ads affiliate we’re pleased to let you know that we’ve begun using tinyurl.com to shorten and secure our affiliate referral links. We encourage you to update your affiliate links using the following:
Homepage URL: http://tinyurl.com/2nwm9u
Starter Promo URL: http://tinyurl.com/354hcd
Those links above are mine. To get your own new tinyurl.com affiliate links, login to your TLA account and grab the new URL in the Affiliate Program tab. TLA Affiliates have 1 week to change over to the new URLs as the old ones will no longer work.
The other problem though is that if you are using these affiliate links embedded in your posts, you will have to track them down from your archives and edit each one of them. I’ve recently discovered that about 25% of my affiliates are coming directly from these old posts.
If you’re familiar with PHPMyAdmin in your cPanel, you can do a lookup command via SQL:
SELECT * FROM ‘wp_posts’ WHERE post_content LIKE ‘%http://www.text-link-ads.com/?ref=10549%’
Or you can do the update directly from there using this sample SQL query:
UPDATE `wp_posts` SET `post_content` = REPLACE(`post_content`, “http://www.text-link-ads.com/?ref=10549”, “http://tinyurl.com/2nwm9u”)
Again, don’t forget to use your own affiliate links.
Yeah, quite troublesome if your not a “geeky guy”. Have to edit manually.lolz…
-100% Pinoy-
The lazy way, and for the not-too-geeky: Search and replace plugin.
It would help to use a redirect file in our own webserver, so that when affiliate links change, we’ll just need to change one file in our site.
What if, in the future, TLA shifts from TinyURL to something else, right?
But if we have something like http://www.example.com/goto/tla.php (where tla.php contains the redirect to the TinyURL address) then that will help us easily handle url changes next time.