According to Wikipedia…

“Deep Linking is making a hyperlink that points to a specific page or image on a web site instead of the home page”

A real live example is in the paragraph above. I just deep linked to Wikipedia so you will land on the exact page explaining this term. You may not even think twice about it when you’re on blogs and other people’s site. You may even be actively doing it because it helps make your content rich and relevant.

Deep linking is also good to establish usability. The last thing you want to do when creating content is to frustrate readers and make them search for the page or item you’re referring to. People expect logical continuity when they click on a link.

As an affiliate, I always love it when marketers allow me to use deep links to their content and still cookie my referral. It makes me want to talk about that program, their content and link to their stuff everywhere in all types of content I create – videos, blog posts, reports, tools, landing pages etc.

In short – deep linking is good for you and your affiliate.

Many shopping cart and affiliate systems have this feature. Off the top of my head, 1ShoppingCart, Digital Access Pass, Delavo they all offer this. In this post, I’d like to focus just on aMember.

Traditionally this is not a feature that it supports. The good news is, this is not very difficult to do if you have a geek working with you. He (or she) can whip up a quick script to do all that.

Another way is to use our RSSBrander plugin because it comes bundled with this very script. Big hint – the plugin also a lot cheaper than paying a developer to write custom code for you 🙂

Once you have installed the script (included in RSSBrander), you can now tell affiliates you now support deep linking. Here is an example how they would craft their affiliate coded deep links.

Assuming your jump script is installed here:
http://yourmembersite.com/jump.php

The page affiliate wants people to land on:
http://yourblog.com/123/some-cool-post/

Affiliate’s ID: 987

The link affiliates should use:
http://yourmembersite.com/jump.php?r=987&u=yourblog.com/123/some-cool-post/

So in reality, the affiliate needs to save this portion:

http://yourmembersite.com/jump.php?r=987&u=

Then append the URL of the page they want people to go at the end. Pretty neat side perk of the plugin.

Learn what else the RSSBrander can do for you.