We have created a tool to help you make your own custom product links. Just go to the Create a Custom Link to a Page (http://www.shareasale.com/a-customproductlink.cfm) tool and enter in the Merchant program, the destination URL and any optional affiliate defined tracking information.
Below are detailed instructions for affiliates looking to automate the process of creating custom product links.
You can create your own product links if a merchant has not provided any. The first step is to grab a standard text link for the merchant. A standard text link will look like this:
http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?B=02&U=XXXX&M=01 This is only an example link. You will need to get a valid text link from the correct merchant's program
Where the XXXX is replaced with your Affiliate ID number.
The next step is to find the URL for the product page that you want users to see. For this example, lets say we want to redirect folks to this help page (http://www.shareasale.com/a-helptopic.cfm?ID=6). First, we drop the http:// from the front of the URL, which leaves us with this:
www.shareasale.com/a-helptopic.cfm?ID=6
We then need to replace some special characters if they exist.
Replace any question marks (?) with %3F
Replace any equals signs (=) with %3D
Replace any ampersands (&) with %26
We now have the following:
www.shareasale.com/a-helptopic.cfm%3FID%3D6
We are now ready to create our link. Start with the standard text link:
http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?B=02&U=XXXX&M=01
And add the phrase &urllink= to the end, giving us this
http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?B=02&U=XXXX&M=01&urllink=
Then, add the product URL that we created to the end, to give us our final link:
http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?B=02&U=XXXX&M=01&urllink=www.shareasale.com/a-helptopic.cfm%3FID%3D6
Please note that some links already have a URLLINK= parameter in them. Don't add a second one, just add your url to the existing one. So if your starting link looks like this:
http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?B=02&U=XXXX&M=01&urllink=&afftrack=
Your final link should look like this:
http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?B=02&U=XXXX&M=01&urllink=www.shareasale.com/a-helptopic.cfm%3FID%3D6&afftrack=
Test it out. View our Verify links are working (http://help.shareasale.com/index.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=viewarticle&kbarticleid=62) help topic to learn how to verify a link is working correctly.
