Update Your Text-Link-Ads.com Referral Link Now

If you are a Text-Link-Ads.com (TLA) publisher you may have received their email notifying publishers that they have begun using tinyurl.com.

The purpose is to shorten and secure the affiliate referral link.

It’s important that you do this today because your current affiliate link will no longer work starting next month.

I quote their email below

As a Text Link Ads affiliate we’re pleased to let you know that we’ve begun using tinyurl.com to shorten and secure our affiliate referral links. We encourage you to update your affiliate links using the following:

Homepage URL
http://tinyurl.com/2vzzuj

Starter Promo URL
http://tinyurl.com/3cnex2

** Please note that our old affiliate urls will no longer work in one week so please update today. Thank you!

Personally I think this move is quite unnecessary and might not be the best thing to do due to the following reasons:

The original affiliate link is already short, making it five characters shorter or so won’t make any different.

http://www.text-link-ads.com/?ref=23915

While I appreciate their attempt to offer a secure affiliate link, it won’t prevent anyone from signing up with TLA directly. In addition, using a shorter URL service that can be abused by spammers would cost TLA the users’ trust. Some people might be reluctant to click on the link because they don’t know where it may take them.

Anyone who has been promoting TLA heavily would have to hunt down every single links in their blogs and this could mean a lot of unnecessary work. To make this task easier, you can use phpMyAdmin or any MYSQL tool for that matter to update your existing links all at once.

This method works for WordPress blog only. To get started enter the following command into phpMyAdmin

UPDATE `wp_posts` SET `post_content` = REPLACE ( `post_content` , "OLD_TLA_AFF" , "TINYURL_TLA_AFF" )

In case of Sabahan.com, the line would be

UPDATE `wp_posts` SET `post_content` = REPLACE(`post_content`, "http://www.text-link-ads.com/?ref=23915", "http://tinyurl.com/2vzzuj")

(credit: LiewCF.com)

It took me less than one second to update all my TLA links in all my post. I had to update the link on my sidebar manually though. Just be sure to backup your database before running this command.