Just as an example, I’d have to visit each individual site below to check stats, if I didn’t want to rely on the Ninja plugin:

World Nomads
Woo Themes
Commission Junction
e-junkie

I’m even using it to track my own banners/links from Go Backpacking to the sales page for Travel Blog Success. I can then see whether people are clicking the link in my RSS footer (they are), or the leaderboard banner I’ve got up (they are there as well).

Thanks for stopping by Blog to Travel.

Back in mid-2007, I learned how to manually create the redirections as you mentioned, however it was unwieldy. In late 2009, after deciding to treat my blogs like a business, I was willing to spend the money for a powerful plugin to automatically create the redirections, and not only that, but track clicks on those links as well.

The plugin is called MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate: http://bit.ly/9SPRZq

At $97, it’s not cheap, but I’ve found it to be a worthwhile investment. I’m using it on 3 different blogs, and the ability to easily track clicks on affiliate links from within WordPress makes my life a lot easier. I can quickly see which affiliate links are doing well, and which aren’t. Plus, there’s a cool feature whereby I can associate any keyword with an affiliate link, and it will turn that word throughout my blog into the affiliate link.

So I can do mass updates to dozens of posts in minutes. I haven’t even begun to take full advantage of it.

Mind if I ask you a quick question publicly? Are you using a WP plug-in to create your friendly redirection URLs, or are you manually creating them (.htaccess file, etc).

Example: http://www.gobackpacking.com/B...../woothemes