[Warning] If You Don't Control It, Someone *Will* Take It Away From You!
It seems like there are a lot of posts on the forum recently about how marketers are suffering major losses because their accounts are getting shut down, banned, and frozen. It's happened with PayPal, YouTube, HubPages and others.
In nearly every such thread, the warning is given to have a "Plan B" and to create web properties you own and control yourself -- like your own blogs on your own domains. Great advice.
But, there's another area where you can suffer financial losses, too -- in eBooks you have distributed across the web. What happens when the affiliate link you have in an eBook changes or goes dead? Bye-bye income.
The solution? Control your own links. Make sure every link you include in your eBooks runs through a domain YOU control. Just by using simple redirections you can change the destination of any link in any eBook you have floating out in cyberspace -- but you need to do it when you CREATE the eBook! (Sorry, but it's too late if you already have bad links out there.)
An even better solution is tracking software like GoTryThis that runs on your own domain, provides redirection, on-the-fly link creation and valuable stats. (I get nothing from GoTryThis except awsome traffic and stats.) I'm glad a marketing buddy turned me on this years ago. It's saved me a lot of money.
Bottom Line: If you don't control it, eventually you'll lose it!
In nearly every such thread, the warning is given to have a "Plan B" and to create web properties you own and control yourself -- like your own blogs on your own domains. Great advice.
But, there's another area where you can suffer financial losses, too -- in eBooks you have distributed across the web. What happens when the affiliate link you have in an eBook changes or goes dead? Bye-bye income.
The solution? Control your own links. Make sure every link you include in your eBooks runs through a domain YOU control. Just by using simple redirections you can change the destination of any link in any eBook you have floating out in cyberspace -- but you need to do it when you CREATE the eBook! (Sorry, but it's too late if you already have bad links out there.)
An even better solution is tracking software like GoTryThis that runs on your own domain, provides redirection, on-the-fly link creation and valuable stats. (I get nothing from GoTryThis except awsome traffic and stats.) I'm glad a marketing buddy turned me on this years ago. It's saved me a lot of money.
Bottom Line: If you don't control it, eventually you'll lose it!
“An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field†Niels Bohr