Social Sites like Digg, Propeller, Myspace and others all talk about being gamed or spammed. They work towards banning affiliate links and sites because they say - “they have nothing to offer" as unique information. I personally don’t think they ban or work against affiliates and affiliate links because they offer nothing unique. But rather because they are in direct competitions to the social sites desire to sell you the same affiliate offers.

Digg and other social sites are riddled with affiliate banner ads - and they don’t want you or I competing with them. So they ban specific affiliate links. For instance Digg does not allow any urls to be digged that com from Commission junction. And when people use sites thats sole purpose is to redirect sites - such as Tiny url - the social sites caught on an started banning these sites too.

Affiliate marketers understand that they need the social sites to reach large amounts of people - and should continue to use social sites when possible. The question is - How? I suggest that you continue to use redirects. But instead of using popular sites like “Tiny Url” to redirect your affiliate program link - get a website of your own for this specific purpose.

I use - as my redirect site. You get $80 dollars worth of advertising credit for Google and Yahoo advertising. It’s almost like getting free web hosting service for FREE for one year. Second, this wont effect my main site and I don’t have to worry about telling Google’s robot which pages not to crawl because their redirect pages [ urls ].

The interesting thing about this is that it gives me an inexpensive way of going around the social sites bans on affiliate program urls such as CJ.com and others. Unlike Tiny Url - my site is pretty much unknown and only used by me. So the social sites use it as a regular “URL” that has been digged or voted on by an average person. But, affiliates should remember to play by the rules. If you go in and vote only on one site - it doesn’t matter if it’s your site, affiliate link, or your own personal “redirect” site - they will easily see that your simply trying to game the system. So remember to vote on other sites. Make comments on other voted sites and above all - make sure that the affiliate program links you post to a social site is not just one big ad. Make sure you visit the landing page of your affiliate program link and see what pops up. If the link leads to a page that seems informative, interesting and not just one big ad - you will most likely avoid getting the link banned.