New Affiliate Discoveries

Are you a fledgling WordPress blogger?

Does the title of this post mystify you? If so, this post is written for you! I just started using WordPress less than two weeks ago and wanted to offer this tip to save you some time and headaches. And if it’s too late for that, we’ll I’ve got a solution for you too!

Before you make your very first post, go to your WordPress Dashboard, Click on Options->Permalinks, and select one of the options that includes %post name% in the link. Don’t ask why for now, just do it and you’ll save your self some headaches. The reason that this is not selected by default has to do with some technical issues with server software and settings, you can read more about it in the Codex as well as see the entire list of variables that can go in your permalink title.

Confused yet? OK, let me back up…

Permalinks are the links that another blogger would use to direct a reader to an individual post on your site. For example, ProBlogger linked to my very first article “Where to Start?” in his “31 Days to Building a Better Blog” using this permalink:

http://www.newaffiliatediscoveries.com/archives/7

You’ll notice there are three parts to the link. Part one is my domain name, “www.newaffiliatediscoveries.com”, Part 2 is the virtual folder “archives” and part three is the internal “post ID” number from the database. I say “virtual folder” because the folder “archives” does not really exist on my website. I discovered this when I tried to manually save all my old posts. Silly me…wordpress creates the links “on the fly” as they are retrieved from the database.

While this permalink structure does it’s job of getting a reader from ProBlogger to my site, it does nothing for me. When I log into my Google Analytics account, all I see is a post number, and I don’t have any real idea of where my visitors were on my website.

Permalink Migration Plugin Saves the Day!

I decided that I wanted my post name in the permalink structure so that I could make use of the Google Analytics Reports. But lo & behold, when I changed the structure using my WordPress Dashboard, my link from ProBlogger was BROKEN! ACK! Nearly all of my web traffic so far has come from ProBlogger, so I really didn’t want to shut that down by changing my permalinks, but I also knew that the longer I waited, the worse the problem would become as more and more posts grew on my blog.

Some quick searching led me to the perfect solution, in only three clicks. That solution is Dean Lee’s Permalink Migration Plugin. You add the plugin in the usual manner, then set your old structure and your new structure, and now all of your old permalinks are working again! No lost traffic from posts that are already linked to other bloggers or on search engines.

Download Dean Lee’s Plugin right from his website.

Now you’ll notice that when you click on the permalink from above:

http://www.newaffiliatediscoveries.com/archives/7

You’ll be redirected to a pretty looking permalink that tells you right where you are.

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