What are Hop Links and how do they work?

There are many ways to make money online and affiliate marketing can definitely be a profitable way to earn a great income if you are a blogger, entrepreneur or anyone else interested in learning how to make money online. Affiliate marketing offers people who choose this option a way to sell products for other companies without having to physically house the product or the infrastructure needed to sell the product, ship it, invoice it or any of the other logistical nightmares that selling physical or digital products poses and leaves you a way just to make profits from sales. If you do any amount of affiliate marketing then you’ve probably heard the terms “Hop Ads” and “Hop Links” but what exactly do they do and what do they mean?

Hop Links – Ads can’t hop without links

Hop Links allow the affiliate marketer and the manager of the affiliate marketing program to track clicks, source URLs and most importantly sales of affiliate products when a “hop” occurs from an external site with a hop link that then redirects to the seller’s homepage. The relationship that exists is possible because the URL contains specific URL parameters that are passed during the hop and stored so that when a buyer makes a purchase from a hop link that affiliate marketer is credited for their efforts and sees those profits coming in. For those of you who are not familiar with URL parameters, they are parameters passed in the URL with specific values for specific reasons; in this case the reason is to track affiliate marketing sales. The general makeup of a Hop Link looks similar to this…

Installing a Hop Link on your website

Hop Links depending on the affiliate marketing software being used are highly effective for tracking affiliate and are super easy to install. Depending on which affiliate marketing software is generating the hop link the result may be slightly different. However with that said, once you’ve got your website’s source code in front of you to add the hop link all you need to do is enter the hop link using an A HREF html tag like this…

<a href =”YOURHOPLINK” > TEXT FOR YOUR BUYER’S TO CLICK ON</a>

After you’ve got this you can start earning commissions from affiliate marketing sales. Pretty easy right?

Gideon Shalwick from BecomeABlogger.com has a video that explains hop links very well. The only thing that I want to add is that in this video, Gideon uses ClickBank as the example but the concept of a hop link can be applied to other affiliate marketing companies like E-Junkie.com and PepperJam to name two others.

If you’ve just started promoting affiliate products, or you are managing an affiliate marketing campaign yourself to make more money having people sell your products than understanding the concept of a Hop Link, how to install it and how it works.

Luc Arnold

“Hop all the way to the bank!”