Your old store.fan/a/ referral links still work. Audit them anyway

There is a video of yours from last year that still picks up a trickle of views every week. Somewhere in its description, below the timestamps, sits a link you pasted once and never looked at again. It might be a store.fan/a/ link from back when that was the only format. It still redirects, so nothing looks broken, which is precisely why nobody ever checks it. Sweeping those links is one of the least glamorous jobs on your list and one of the few that keeps working after you close the laptop.

Nobody audits their own back catalogue

The reason is not laziness. A link either works or it does not, and yours works, so there is no error to chase and no complaint in your inbox. Broken things get fixed. Slightly out-of-date things live forever.

The genuinely hard part is that your links sit on surfaces with completely different rules. Some you can edit in ten seconds: a video description, a pinned comment, a card on your storefront, a page on your own site. Some you can edit but will never remember: the resources section inside your own course, a shared doc you sent a client in March. And some you cannot edit at all, such as a podcast episode where you said the address out loud, or somebody else's round-up post that mentions you.

There is one useful exception. If the out-of-date link lives inside a file you delivered through store.fan, you are not stuck: replacing the file updates it for everyone who already bought, including the person who downloaded it a year ago. Everything else is a judgement call, which is why the job feels vague enough to postpone. Treat it as an inventory rather than an optimisation and it becomes finite: a list of places, a column for whether you can edit them, one afternoon.

What an hour actually changes

None of this is about rescuing dead links. It is about turning a scatter of half-remembered mentions into something you can see, and giving the recommendation a permanent home instead of eleven temporary ones.

The sweep, in order

Do the listing before the editing. If you start pasting immediately you will fix four obvious places, feel finished, and miss the pinned post that actually sends people. The affiliate programme is where your current code lives, so start there.

1. 1Open the affiliate section of your dashboard and copy your link: join.store.fan/yourcode. Park it in a note you can paste from without hunting.
2. 2Write the list of surfaces before you change anything. Video descriptions, pinned comments, your newsletter archive, your storefront, your own site, every PDF or template you hand out, the bio of each account you still post from.
3. 3Mark each one editable or not. The editable ones are a paste job. The rest need a different fix, or no fix at all.
4. 4Click every old link before you replace it. Legacy store.fan/a/ links redirect fine, so what you are hunting is the typo version: a stray full stop on the end, a wrapper from a shortener you no longer control, a line break in the middle.
5. 5Replace the editable ones. On store.fan marketing pages a ?ref= parameter also works, which helps when you want to send somebody to a specific page rather than the front door.
6. 6If an old link is printed inside a file you sell or give away here, upload a corrected file rather than editing the link. One upload reaches everyone who already bought.
7. 7Give the recommendation one permanent home: a link card on your storefront, sitting under your own products rather than above them.
8. 8Save the list. Next time this is twenty minutes, not an afternoon.

What this looks like on an ordinary back catalogue

Say you have posted sixty videos and eleven of them mention a tool in the description. Seven are editable in a couple of minutes each. Two live in a PDF you deliver through store.fan, so they are one file upload. One is in a podcast episode you cannot change, and one is on a site that is not yours. That is roughly forty minutes of clicking, plus a note listing the two you have written off. The output is not a number going up; it is knowing where your recommendations sit.

The ladder is worth understanding before you decide how much effort this deserves. Commission runs from 25% to 50%, and your rung is set by how many of your referrals paid in the last 30 days, so it responds to recent activity rather than lifetime totals. Each referral pays you for their first 12 months. That shape rewards a steady trickle from evergreen posts more than one enthusiastic week. It does not say how many people will sign up, and nobody can tell you that. It says where the ones who do will have come from.

The mistake most people make

It is not stale links. It is treating the sweep as the whole job. A referral link is a recommendation with a URL attached, and a recommendation ages faster than a URL does. If you tidy eleven descriptions today and never mention the tool again, you have straightened a shelf nobody visits. The version that holds up is duller: you keep using the thing, you keep answering the same question in public, and the link happens to be in place when somebody asks. If you are not sure the recommendation still stands, read the current plans before you paste anything, so you are describing what exists today rather than what you signed up to.

An audit is unglamorous work that nobody will compliment you on. It also takes less time than the post you will write this week, and unlike that post it applies to everything you have already published. Put a date in the calendar for six months from now and do it again while the list is still accurate.