You probably already know that it’s a good idea to cloak (hide) your affiliate links. Doing so will help ward off the link hijackers who switch in their affiliate ID for yours, and thus steal your commission when they buy the product. It also virtually reduces the number of buyers who “cut off” the affiliate portion of a link and go straight to the sales page (perhaps thinking that doing so will somehow give them a better deal).
But there’s another reason to use direct affiliate links: Namely, because you could end up with hundreds of “dead” links all over the Internet.
You see, if you make a blog post, Twitter about an affiliate product or include your direct affiliate link in an ebook, then what happens if the vendor stops selling that product? You’ll have dead links. Maybe hundreds of them.
If instead you use a redirect link, you can change the redirect link to point from the dead affiliate link to a similar affiliate product in just a minute or two. And in doing so, you could potentially save thousands of dollars in affiliate commissions.