Disclosure. FIFO.media is built and operated by Ensomnia Media. This site uses it to manage its links. Details.

Step 3 — Track

The Affiliate Toolkit

What you actually need to run affiliate links — and the one piece almost everyone skips.

The honest minimum

You need less than the internet tells you. To start you need: somewhere to publish, one affiliate program, and a way to track your links. That is it. No course, no funnel software, no paid ads.

The third item is the one people leave out, and it is the reason so many people conclude affiliate marketing "doesn't work". They post the same raw URL to four places, get some clicks, cannot attribute any of them, and have no idea what to do more of.

Why a raw affiliate URL is a bad link

  • It is unreadable. Long strings of tracking parameters look like spam and suppress clicks.
  • You cannot say it out loud. Useless in a video, a podcast, or on a printed card.
  • It is permanent. When the program changes or ends, every post you ever made points somewhere broken.
  • It tells you nothing. The merchant sees the click. You mostly do not.

What a link manager fixes

A link manager sits between your audience and the merchant. You publish one short link; it redirects to the real affiliate URL and records the click on the way through.

  1. One clean link per offer. Memorable, speakable, on-brand.
  2. Editable destination. Change where it points without touching a single published post. This is the single most valuable property when a program shuts down.
  3. Attribution. Referrer and UTM breakdowns tell you which channel sent the click.
  4. Organisation. Categories keep a growing library navigable, and roll clicks up by theme.
The House Tool

FIFO.media — the one I actually use.

Straight context first: FIFO.media is built and operated by Ensomnia Media, not by me. I am a user of it. I tried it when I got tired of not knowing which placement produced a click, and it is what I have run my links through since.

That is also why it is the tool I can be most concrete about. Every number on the playbooks page comes straight out of my own FIFO dashboard — it is the only tool on this site I can show you the inside of rather than just describe.

  • Sub-50ms redirects, so the click never feels slow
  • Editable destinations — the link outlives the program
  • Clicks by referrer, UTM source, device, browser, and country
  • Cookieless: no IP logging, no fingerprinting, no consent banner
  • Categories plus public link-in-bio pages
  • Free tier covers your first 25 links and 3 categories
Try FIFO Free See Plans

Honest alternatives

FIFO is what I landed on, not the only option, and it would be poor form to pretend otherwise. If you want to compare: Bitly and Rebrandly are the best-known commercial shorteners, Pretty Links is the standard WordPress plugin, and if you self-host, YOURLS is free and open source. Any of them beats posting a raw affiliate URL.

What I would actually check when comparing: does it let you edit the destination after publishing, does it show referrer and UTM breakdowns, does it set cookies (which drags you into consent-banner territory), and does it let you export or query your own data.

The rest of the stack

  • Somewhere to publish. A site you control beats a platform you rent. Platform accounts get suspended; domains do not.
  • An email list. The only audience that cannot be taken away by an algorithm change.
  • A disclosure habit. Not a tool, but non-negotiable. Disclose close to the link, in plain language.
  • A spreadsheet. Genuinely. Track which program you joined, when, and under what terms.
See the Real Numbers

What a live link portfolio actually looks like