Cheese me. I was in the Linkshare interface the other night getting Allzine links for blog posting about on the Roamsters.com site. Thirty magazines were returned in the Travel & Leisure category. I grabbed about ten of them, creating ten draft posts with magazine pictures and titles and planned to write descriptions of them later.
Well, good thing I clicked on some of those links. More than half of them no longer exist in Allzine’s product database. Really, when I searched the Travel & Leisure category within Allzines itself, only 9 magazines were returned, meaning that 21 TWENTY-ONE!!!! of the Linkshare links were no good.
Of the nine that WERE good, some of them had broken graphics.
Lesson to affiliates: Check the merchant’s site first to see whether or not the product is still offered. It’s a hassle, I know, but better than wasting your time putting up product links that don’t work and thereby frustrating your visitors.
Suggestion to merchants: Kindly make sure your product links are up to date!
About Rosalind Gardner
[...] Few things are more annoying than setting up an affiliate site, only to realize that half the advertiser’s links are expired or point to an error page! I’ve had crap like that happen to me, and so has Rosalind Gardner. [...]