Evergreen Links: A Recap
In part one of this series, I talked about what evergreen links are and why you might want to use them.
To recap, an evergreen link has two parts:
Part one is a link that is permanent and goes in the back of your ebook or on your marketing material. This is the link the reader clicks on.
Part two is the URL behind the permanent link that takes the reader to the place you want them to end up. This is the part you will change as necessary.
For example, if you include a link to your latest book on your printed marketing materials, then you might create an evergreen link www.myevergreenlinkBOOK.com.
In 2018 that link would take the reader to: www.mywebsiteBOOK2018.com.
In 2019 that link would take the reader to: www.mywebsiteBOOK2019.com.
There’s no need to reprint your marketing materials, just change the destination link.
Using the Redirection Plugin
In this post I’m going to show you how to set up an evergreen link using the Redirection plugin for WordPress.org self-hosted sites.
Installation
Step one: Log into your WordPress admin dashboard
Step two: In the dashboard sidebar, go down to Plugins>>Add Plugins
Step three: Search for Redirection
Step four: The plugin you want should be the first one that shows up (See image below.)
Step five: Install the plugin
Step six: Activate the plugin
Create The evergreen link
Step seven: Now that the plugin has been activated, go down to Tools. There will be an option for Redirection. Select this to bring up the Redirection dashboard.
The top part shows existing redirects.
The bottom part is where we’ll create new redirects.
SOURCE: This is the permanent link.
TARGET: This is the changeable link.
Taking the example from the last post, if I have a book coming out that’s not yet on preorder at Amazon, I can put a link in the back of my ebooks to send interested readers to the book’s page on my website where they can sign up for my newsletter and be notified when the book is live.
I set up the redirect as follows:
SOURCE: /mynewbookRETAILER
TARGET: /newbook
Note: When setting up the redirect I don’t have to put in https://www.mywebsite.com. That's because behind the scenes, Redirection automatically includes the web address it’s installed at in front of the /.
However, I do need to include the entire URL in my ebook or on my marketing materials: https://www.mywebsite.com/mynewbookRETAILER
Update THE EVERGREEN LINK
Once the book is live at Amazon, I go back into Redirection.
This time I go to the already existing redirect. When I hover my mouse over it the Edit, Delete, Disable menu appears.
I click Edit.
Then I change the TARGET to: https://www.amazon.com/newbook
This time I do have to include the full web address because I’m sending the reader off of my site and Redirection needs to understand that. Otherwise, it will assume the link is on my site.
So, that’s it. Pretty simple.
SORTING
You can click on any of the blue column headers in order to sort by that attribute. In this image, I clicked on the Hits title in order to sort by the number of hits each link has received.
search
You can run a search on a word or phrase within your Redirection URLs.
Metrics
You get a few metrics with Redirection:
POS is the order in which the links were created, starting at 0.
Hits indicates how many times the link has been clicked.
Last Access is the last time the link was accessed.
In Summary
The Redirection plugin for WordPress.org sites is an easy way to create evergreen links. It doesn't require much technical know-how to install or use.
The one disadvantage is that each evergreen link can get rather long, particularly if you have a long base URL, such as I do with https://thewriterstechstop.com. If this is a concern for you, check out my next post.
In the Next Post
I’ll talk about how to create evergreen links using the online link shortener Tiny.cc.
Until then, Happy Writing!