I got an e-mail in my inbox yesterday that looked a bit suspicious. I originally suspected that someone was mass e-mailing text link ads affiliates notifying them of an affiliate link change in an attempt to hijack their earnings. The rather quick time frame made the e-mail seem even more strange.

Kenny,

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/36ogw5
Starter Promo URL — http://tinyurl.com/2wm2uu

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

Thank you!

I just saw on John’s blog that he got the same e-mail (with different links) so it looks like they are switching the links over to tinyurl. I find it quite odd, and stupid really, that this change is being made. Affiliates only have one week to change over all the links to the new format. Anyone that isn’t using some sort of redirection system (like I am on my blog) will have to hunt down every link and manually change it to the new URL. One weeks time seems a bit sudden, especially for the lazier affiliates who don’t check their e-mail daily.

All of my links to Text Link Ads use this format: http://tlastart.hatethegrind.com/. All I have to do now is change the redirection setup to point to the new affiliate URL, and I’m done. A new benefit now is that users wont see the link to tinyurl and avoid clicking on it.

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