Affiliate Setup Tip: How to Pick your Affiliate ID.

Something that comes up in a regular basis as a question or topic of conversation is picking our affiliate ids or subdomains when joining a new affiliate program.

The issues are similar to picking a domain, or a username in a social media site.

If you're an experienced affiliate then you automatically know what to do, but if you aren't too familiar with the industry then this could be a daunting step.

Your subid, or subdomain, or affiliate id is something that you should think about when you sign up to be an affiliate for a product or even if you're just going to use a product.

Sometimes when you sign up for an affiliate program or an affiliate network, you are automatically assigned an alpha-numeric affiliate id. In those cases, this blog post will not do diddly squat for you. Head over to the home page and read another one of my recent articles.

In other cases, you'll be asked to pick an id when you join the program and this id or username will be used as part of your affiliate links.

I'll use Leadpages as an example.

When I signed up for Leadpages, I knew I would be using the service for many different types of promotional campaigns.

I didn't want to tie my name down. Leadpages requires you to pick a name that will be used in your custom URL when you join and activate an account. Once you pick that, you cannot change it.

Some people would automatically pick their usual name or their brand name for something like this, but I didn't and let me tell you why.

I  use Leadpages to promote all sorts of products so I picked a versatile name, instead of "oscargonzalez" or "notagrouch" or something like that. Instead, I picked "websystem." It's generic but sounds official.

If I were planning to use the Leadpages account just for one purpose and never deviate from that, then maybe I would have picked a different name, or my usual name like notagrouch, something more branded perhaps.

This is the dilemma of picking our username or userid, or subdomain, or subid when we join a site. If you're going to use the link in various scenarios, you should consider a balanced approach.

If you're going to use your affiliate link in different websites that you own, you should also consider the name of your user id or affiliate name and try to make it flexible to fit the different websites.

Case in point, the Amazon associates program allows you to create different user ids for your links, not just for tracking, but for perception and branding.

You have to consider branding and perception.

Some people will make a judgment on the name that is visible. Some people look for your affiliate id in links that you provide for them and will actively remove it sometimes.

If you use a generic name like I mentioned above then it's a little more difficult to discern, and I could use that same URL on my personal blog, on a business blog, on a totally new niche blog and the name will still be fine.

In fact, I would say that marketing is the art of manipulating perception.  Just like you spend time coming up with a name for your next project, or website, spend some time thinking of the different names you could use when joining a new affiliate network and consider the different type of applications for your affiliate links.