Add-on: Outlinks
$49/year
Every link you mention. One URL. Total control.
Own every link in your show — forever.
Every time you mention something — a book, a tool, a resource, a sponsor product — that reference appears in show notes, transcripts, newsletters, and maybe 30 more episodes before you’re done. Outlinks gives each reference a clean URL at yoursite.com/go/[slug] that you control forever.
Update once. Every episode fixes itself. The destination URL changed? The affiliate program migrated? The sponsor relaunched? Update the reference’s URL once, in any episode or your show’s reference library, and every link to yoursite.com/go/[slug] goes to the new destination instantly — on every episode page that cites it, and anywhere else you’ve pasted it. Affiliate program moved? Change the affiliate URL once in Outlinks and the same thing happens. No hunting through years of old episodes.
Know exactly which episode drove every click. The Outlinks tab in each show’s settings shows total clicks broken down by episode: The Lean Startup → 212 total clicks — Episode 1: 50, Episode 12: 40, Episode 44: 122. You can see which episodes make listeners act — not just aggregate totals. Route listeners in different countries to the right regional URL automatically. Get notified before your audience hits a dead link.
It works for any reference you want to manage: sponsors, affiliate products, recommended tools, books, your other shows, resources you’ve linked repeatedly. The affiliate use case is where Outlinks earns its keep most visibly — but the underlying problem, references scattered across dozens of episodes that are impossible to maintain, applies to every link you’ve ever put in show notes.
Where Outlinks really pays off: affiliates.
Affiliate link management is where “update once, fix everywhere” has the most dramatic impact.
Your affiliate link to a tool you’ve recommended across 40 episodes just changed — new network, new URL. With plain links in show notes: 40 manual edits, some inevitably missed, some episodes pointing to a dead link for months before anyone notices. With Outlinks: one update. Done.
Your affiliate dashboard shows 847 clicks last quarter. Without episode context, you have no idea which conversations drove them. With Outlinks, you see exactly: Episode 12 drove 340, Episode 44 drove 80. Now you know which topics make your audience act — and you can deliberately create more of those moments.
Automatic affiliate disclosures handle FTC compliance passively. When any reference in an episode has an affiliate URL set, Benecaster adds a disclosure line to that episode’s references on your site, configurable per show — default: “This episode contains affiliate links — we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.” No per-episode action required.
One link, anywhere you share it.
Tracked references appear as yoursite.com/go/slug links in the References section of each episode page, and every click there is attributed to its episode automatically. The same link works anywhere else you paste it — your episode description, a newsletter, a social post — and those clicks count toward the redirect’s total too.
Everything in one place.
- One redirect per reference — per-episode attribution is automatic
- → Track button in the episode editor: click next to any URL to create a clean redirect at
yoursite.com/go/[slug]in one step; shows running click count inline once created - Retroactive — track any reference in any episode, old or new
- Affiliate URL per redirect — update once, all episodes update automatically
- Geographic routing — per-redirect country-specific destination URLs (US → amazon.com, UK → amazon.co.uk, default for all others); resolves using the site’s local GeoIP database, no external API call per redirect. Uses Benecaster’s GeoIP lookup, which you switch on with a free MaxMind account; until then, every visitor gets the default URL
- Link expiry — set an expiry date; routes to a configurable fallback after that date (seasonal sponsorships, time-limited offers, course enrollments)
- Link Health — weekly (or daily) background check of every tracked link and every external link and image in your published episodes, pages, and posts — show notes and podcatcher descriptions included; broken images detected alongside broken links; email digest of new issues; exclude specific domains, post types, or categories to reduce noise; fix broken items inline — update, unlink, or convert to a tracked redirect
- Bot filtering — known crawlers excluded from click counts; bot traffic logged separately as “filtered clicks”
- Forward URL parameters — query params appended to your redirect URL are forwarded to the destination (required by some affiliate networks)
Click report: In each show’s settings, a table of that show’s redirects with total human clicks, per-episode breakdown (expandable), last clicked, and Link Health status (healthy, broken, expired, unchecked, or excluded). Sortable by total clicks, activity, and status. A summary line counts broken links and images site-wide and links to the Link Health page.
One click to start tracking any reference.
The → Track button appears next to every reference URL in the episode editor. Click it, confirm or edit the auto-suggested slug, and the redirect is created. The button changes to show the running click count — 47 clicks — inline.
Every episode that cites the same reference feeds the same total, broken down by episode in the click report.
Data captured (no PII).
Per click: redirect slug and episode context, timestamp, whether it came from your site, country code (from local GeoIP — raw IP discarded immediately), and bot flag. No personal information stored. No individual subscriber identified.
Even More Powerful With
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Sponsor Manager — assign your sponsor’s Outlinks redirects to their Sponsor Manager record, and the clicks on those links flow into the sponsor report alongside download counts.
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Show Notes Bibliography — the two share each episode’s references, so a bibliography entry you track renders as its
/go/link, with clicks counted per episode. Change a reference’s URL once and every bibliography that cites it follows.
Requires / Works with
- Requires: Any Benecaster plan, including Launch (free)
- Requires: The enhanced References field (built into Benecaster — Outlinks adds the → Track button on top of it)
- Works with: Any affiliate network that supports URL parameter forwarding