How To Forward A Domain Using Your Affiliate (hop)Link

I get a lot of questions regarding domain forwarding. The thing is.. article directories like Ezine Articles don’t allow you to use your hoplink (affiliate link) and they also only allow the so called root forwarding. This means that you have to buy a domain name and have it forward to the product page if you want to be able to send potential customers directly to a sales page.

So here is my Domain Forwarding For Newbies Guide
#1 Root Forwarding
#2 Create A Forwarding Folder

Since most I know are using GoDaddy.com to buy domain names (.info domains for only $1) this guides uses screenshots from them.

#1 Root Forwarding | Root URL Redirection

Once you have bought your domain (at GoDaddy.com), login and go to the “My Domains” page and click on the name of the domain you wish to forward (to a sales page using your affiliate link/hoplink).

On the next screen, click the “Forward” button (see image below)

Now you should be seeing the “Forward and Mask Domains” screen (see img below)
You need to do the following:
1) make sure you are on the “Forwarding page”
2) Click the “Enable Forwarding”
3) Paste your hoplink/affiliate link into the “Forward to:” box
4) Click the “301 Move…” selection
5) Move over to the Masking page (instructions below)

Now you should be seeing the “Forward and Mask Domains” page, Masking Page (see img below)

You need to do the following:
1) Click the “Enable Masking”
2) Put description in the “Masked description Meta tag” (using not more than 160 chars)
3) Put you domain name in the “Masked title” – Make sure you use “http:YourDomainNam…” (I forgot the “http://” part in the screensot)
4) Put your best keywords in the “Masked keyword Meta tag”
5) Press the “OK” button

This is all there is to it.. It takes a few minutes for the forwarding to “go online” – just check regularly. If it is not working withing 30 minutes than go through all the steps again to make sure you did everything correctly.

If you have any questions.. just place a comment and I’ll answer as quickly as possible.

#2 Create A Forwarding Folder | Folder URL Redirection

Here I explain the other kind of forwarding/redirections. In the guide above we were redirection any traffic coming to YourDomainName.info

But there is another way to do things. Let’s say you don’t really want to buy a domain for every product then you can simply get one domain, host it and then create a forwarding folder for each product you need forwarding. I would not recommend this since some of the best article directories (like Ezine Articles will not allow it). I will however show how this is done since it is a very useful method for those creating niche sites.

Lets say you just signed up as an affiliate to a dog training program and you just bought MyDogTrainingProgram.com at GoDaddy.com (yes.. that domain name is available as this is written). You are going to build a niche dog training site there with training tips and tricks for dog owners and then promote the training program you just signed up as affiliate to.

The best way to forward to the training program from your site is to use a forwarding folder, for example: http://MyDogTrainingProgram.com/go/nameofprogram
In the code this would look like this:
<a href=”http://MyDogTrainingProgram.com/go/nameofprogram” >TextLinkHere</a>

For this to work you need to do two things:
1) You need to access your website using an ftp program and create the folder
2) You need to tell your host provider how to  forward all visist to this folder

and here is how you do those two things..

First of all, hopefully you are using HostGator or Bluehost. These are the two best hosting providers you can get for niche sites, it’s a simple as that. The screenshots below are taken from one of my HostGator accounts and it looks almost identical to Bluehost.

1) Let’s start by creating the folder we need (http://MyDogTrainingProgram.com/go/nameofprogram)
If you know how to use an FTP program that is great and I really don’t need to explain this to you. For those of you not familiar with FTP I’m going to simply use the FTP  filemanager that is readily available on your so called cPanel (control panel) at HostGator or Bluehost.

Start by logging into the control panel (cPanel) of your hosting account (you should have received login information in an e-mail when you signed up)

On the cPanel main menu find the “FileManager” (see image below)

Once you click it it might ask you to select which directory to open, just select the web root (see image below) and click OK

After selecting the Web Root directory you should be taken to a screen looking similar to the one in the image below…
Make sure that you are in the WWW or public_html directory and then click the “New Folder” button.

In this example I decided to name my folder “go” (see image below)

You should be able to see it in the File Manager now (see image below)

Now that you have created the “go” folder select it in the webtree (see image below) and then click the “create folder” button again.

You should give this folder the same name as the product. Example: if the product name is Dog Training Guide then name the folder “dogtrainingguide”… to keep things simple I just named my folder “ProductName” (see image below)

You are now done with the first part as we have created this directory http://www.DogTrainingProgram.com/go/ProductName

2) Now lets create the redirect.
Since you have created a folder, all you need is to tell the Host that youwant to redirect all traffic that comes to this folder.

Log into your hosting account. At your cPanel find a box called “Domains” in it should be a button called “Redirects” – Click it.. (see image below)

On your screen you should see something very similar to the image below…

a) Select the “TYPE Permanent 301″
b) You put in your domain name  as shown in the picture.
c) Behind the domain name you put the name of the two folders you just created earlier. In my case I created a “go” folder and the “ProductName” and you can see that in the picture (don’t forget the forward slash between them.
d) Paste your hoplink/affiliate link into the “redirects to” box
e) I always select “Redirect with or without the www.” – It ensures that it will forward all traffic even if I forget to put the www in my link
f) You don’t really need the Wild Card Redirect. It’s just a habit of mine to have it set like this
g) now just press ADD

If you have done everything correctly you should now test it. Open a new browser window and type in it: http://www.YourDomainName.com/go/ProductName
It should redirect you through the hoplink you used.

If it’s not working make sure you have everything spelled correctly and that the folders are where they should be.
If you can’t figure it out just use the comments below and I’ll help you throught the steps

Now you can add folders and products to promote
Now that you have learned to use folder redirects you can add more folders to this site if you want to promote more than just the one product. This gives you the power of promoting just as many products as you want using this one domain.. it also makes it very easy to stop promoting one product and start promoting something else.

Good luck
Tryggvi