Easy Affiliate Links with Two Mac Apps
Which do you prefer? 80% of your bandwidth and attention consumed by ads or some affiliate links sprinkled through the text? I prefer affiliate links and that’s mostly how I pay for this site. I’ve been running a Keyboard Maestro macro for years that converts links on my clipboard to affiliate tagged URLs. I’m always happy to replace my scripts with a professionally made and supported alternative and here’s a good way to do that.
The first thing to get is StretchLink by Brett Terpstra. This isn’t required but I like clean links. StretchLink removes all of the “junk” on a link. For Amazon links, it removes all of the query parameters you may have used to find the thing. It just sits in your menu bar and watches everything you copy. If it finds a URL it removes the cruft.
Next, get Affiliate.app from the App Store.1 It watches the clipboard and converts iTunes links to affiliate links. Luckily these apps work well together. Some how, StretchLink runs first and cleans up a link and Affiliate.app runs second and adds the affiliate tag.
Now you can copy a link from the App Store and get it automatically converted to a simple affiliate version link this: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/affiliate/id789724698?at=11l5Ug
This also works well for Amazon affiliate links which are often very ugly and overloaded with parameters.
The next time you copy an Amazon URL to tell someone about an awesome wheelbarrow, it’s automatically converted to an affiliate link that’s also pretty simple.2
Amazon provides a convenient link validator if you want to confirm it’s working.
StretchLink | $2
Affiliate | $1
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Note that Affiliate has not been updated in a long time. I wish StretchLink had this functionality or that Blink was on the Mac. The key is automatic conversion of the clipboard, otherwise I’d just keep using my own solutions. ↩︎
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If your friends and family have an issue with you making a few pennies off of the exchange, at no cost to them, then I’d recommend you tell them about StretchLink to remove the tags. Then stop helping them find wheelbarrows. ↩︎