Getting Started with AffProf

A 5-minute walkthrough to set up your account, create your first tracked link, and start protecting every click.

What you'll do in this guide

1. Create your free account
2. Get familiar with your home dashboard
3. Set up your brand (optional, but recommended)
4. Create your first product and link
5. Share your link and watch the analytics roll in
6. Use quick actions on each link
7. Understand link health monitoring

You can complete all of this in under 10 minutes. No credit card required.

1. Create your free account

Head to app.affprof.com/register and sign up with your email and a password. There's no email verification step holding you back, and no payment information needed.

The Free plan gives you up to 10 links and 2 products — enough to test AffProf with a real campaign before you decide whether to upgrade.

2. Your home dashboard

After signing in, you land on your Home page. This is your at-a-glance view:

Three cards show the essentials:

• Total links — how many short links you've created and how many are active
• Broken links — anything that needs your attention right now
• Clicks (last 30 days) — total traffic across all your links

The quick-action buttons let you jump straight into creating a link, opening analytics, or browsing your full link list.

3. Set up your brand (optional)

Before creating links, you can configure a brand — a saved logo and color combination that AffProf applies to your QR codes automatically. This is optional, but if you plan to share QR codes anywhere (videos, presentations, packaging, in-person events), it's worth the 30 seconds.

Go to Settings → Brands → Add brand:

Fill in:

• Name — a short label like "My YouTube" or "Carlos Media"
• Logo — JPG, PNG, or WEBP up to 4 MB. This appears in the center of your QR codes
• QR foreground — the main QR color. Darker colors scan more reliably
• QR background — needs enough contrast against the foreground

Toggle "Default brand" if you want this brand pre-selected every time you open the QR dialog.

4. Create your first product, then your first link

In AffProf, every link belongs to a product. A product represents a brand, blog, channel, or campaign you're promoting. This grouping is what makes your analytics meaningful — you can see which campaigns drive the most clicks, which products have broken links, and so on.

Create a product

Go to Products → New product and give it a name (e.g., "My Tech Blog", "YouTube Channel", "Notion Affiliate Program").

Create your first link

Go to Links → New link and you'll see this form:

Let's walk through each section:

Basic info

• Product: select the product you just created
• Base URL: paste your full affiliate URL — the long, ugly one. AffProf will detect existing UTM parameters automatically if you've already added them
• Platform: which affiliate network this link belongs to (Amazon, ShareASale, Impact, Hotmart, etc.). This is just for your own organization
• Slug: this is the part that appears in your short link. Type your own (e.g., airpods-pro-review) or click Suggest to auto-generate one
• Link availability: leave on. If you ever need to pause a link without deleting it, toggle this off

UTM tracking

Add UTM parameters here and AffProf builds the final destination URL automatically. The most common pattern:

• Source: where the link will be posted (instagram, youtube, newsletter)
• Medium: the type of placement (bio, video-description, email)
• Campaign: the campaign name (spring-launch, q4-promo)

You don't need to fill all five — Source, Medium, and Campaign are usually enough.

Options

• QR brand: pick a saved brand (from step 3) to style this link's QR code
• Fallback URL: if this link breaks or you disable it, visitors get redirected here instead of seeing an error. We strongly recommend setting this — it's the difference between losing a click and recovering it

Organization

Add tags to make filtering easier later. Tags are flexible labels like amazon, tech, black-friday, youtube. A link can have multiple tags, and you'll be able to filter analytics by them.

Click Create link and you're done.

5. Share your link and watch analytics

Your new link is now live and ready to share. You'll find it in Links with a row showing the short URL, the destination, click count, and status.

Click on any link to open its detail panel. You'll see two tabs:

Overview tab

Shows everything about the link itself — the short URL (with a one-click copy button), the destination, product, platform, UTM parameters, tags, notes, and current status. You can disable the link from here, which keeps it in your account but stops the redirect.

Analytics tab

This view shows everything about the link's traffic:

• Total clicks, mobile share, QR scans, and unique countries
• Clicks over time — the full timeline so you can see when traffic spikes
• Sources — where visitors come from (direct, social, search, email)
• Devices, operating systems, browsers — your audience profile
• Countries — geographic breakdown
• Link Health — uptime, average response time, and per-check history
• Recent clicks — every individual click with timestamp, location, device, and whether the redirect succeeded
• Recent checks — the full monitoring log with status codes and response times

For a higher-level view across all your links, use the main Dashboard instead.

6. Quick actions on each link

In your Links table, every row has an actions menu (the three dots on the right) that gives you fast access to the most common tasks without opening the full detail panel:

• View details — opens the detail panel with Overview and Analytics tabs
• Copy short URL — instantly copies the link to your clipboard, ready to paste anywhere
• Open destination URL — opens the actual affiliate destination in a new tab so you can verify it's working
• QR Code — opens the QR generator modal (more on this below)
• Check link — runs an immediate health check instead of waiting for the next scheduled one. Useful when you've just fixed something and want to confirm it's working
• Disable link — pauses the redirect without deleting the link or losing analytics
• Edit — opens the create link form pre-filled with this link's settings
• Delete — permanently removes the link and its analytics

Generating QR codes

When you click QR Code from the actions menu (or from the link detail panel), you get this modal:

You can:

• Choose which brand to apply for this specific download. The dropdown lets you pick any saved brand or use the default AffProf style. This means one link can be downloaded as multiple QR variations — for example, a colored version for Instagram and a black-and-white version for printed materials
• Preview how the QR will look with your logo and colors before downloading
• Download as PNG in one click, ready to embed in videos, presentations, packaging, or any physical material

The QR scans count as a separate metric in your analytics, so you can see exactly how much of your traffic comes from QR-driven sources versus regular clicks.

7. Understand link health monitoring

This is one of the things that makes AffProf different from a generic shortener. Every link you create is automatically checked on a schedule:

• Free plan: once per day
• Pro plan: every 6 hours (4 times per day)

When AffProf detects a broken link, two things happen:

1. The link's status in your dashboard changes from Active to Broken, with a red alert at the top
2. You receive an email notification (you can disable this per-link or globally in Settings)

If you've configured a fallback URL for that link, visitors are automatically redirected to the backup. If not, they see a "link unavailable" page.

The Link Health section on each link's analytics page (visible in step 5) shows you the full check history: response times, status codes, and which checks passed or failed. You can also trigger an immediate manual check anytime from the actions menu (step 6).

What's next?

You're set up. A few things to explore as you grow:

• Connect a custom domain so your links use links.yourbrand.com instead of affprof.com/go/...
• Import your existing links from a CSV if you already have a library to migrate
• Upgrade to Pro when you hit the 10-link limit or want branded QR codes, faster monitoring, and bulk import

Have questions? Email us anytime at hello@affprof.com.