Why and How To Cloak Affiliate links - Affiliate Link Cloaking
Masking your affiliate links (Affiliate Link Cloaking) is a very important exercise to do if you are selling affiliate products on your website. First, majority of affiliate links are generated by computer, so they mostly are quite long and ugly and you may want to change these to short nice looking cloaked links. Most important, however, is to save yourself from affiliate commission hijacking, especially when you are selling a product not only to general public, but to other online marketers as well.
I'll show you what happens when hijackers see your affiliate link to the product they want to buy. Lets assume you are promoting a ClickBank product. Your affiliate url will look like this when you mouse over it:
YourAffiliateID.ProductID.hop.clickbank.net
So, if a person is also a member of ClickBank he is very likely to copy your link instead of clicking it, then paste it to the address bar and change your AffiliateID to his. He is then getting your commission which means that he's basically buying a discounted product and you are getting nothing.
A very nasty thing to do, yes, but it happens and very often. Same with any other affiliate program, not just ClickBank. Even worse when a person simply removes your affiliate id, without being a ClickBank affiliate himself, just to leave you with no commission for the sale. There are people who do this just out of jealousy. So, it is quite important to cloak affiliate links. Following are the best 3 free methods to do it.
Free Affiliate Link Cloaking - Third party affiliate link cloakers!
The easiest and most widely used method to hide and shorten your affiliate links is by using free cloaking services provided by third party websites. They will create a folder at their domain, which will be redirected to your original affiliate link. It takes a few minutes to create a link and your new link will usually look something like this:
http://www.[something].com/yh349d
where [something] is the name of the service
and [yh349d] - randomly generated letters and numbers
There are many to chose from, so it's not a problem to google one with domain name that you will like.
However, there are certain disadvantages of this method:
# First, you don't have access or control over their hosting or internet provider, so if their website is down your links will also become broken, and in most cases you won't notice until you click the link yourself.
# Additionally, the links are also computer generated and will usually look like the example above and will have nothing to do with the provided product, so it will be hard to remember these for your visitors.
Here are some of the most famous third party affiliate link cloaker services for you:
TinyUrl.com
KlasLink.com
MoveTo.ws
Affiliate Link Cloaking using HTML
This method is also used by marketers very often. However, you need a domain name and hosting to do this. You can still use some free hosting though. This is also a good option for those whos hosting doesn't support PHP scripts, but HTML only.
The disadvantage of this method is that sometimes users disable "meta refresh" in their browsers, so instead of being redirected automatically they will have to click manually and will be able to see your affiliate id when they mouse over the link on your hub page. It's very very rare though.
To use this method you need to create a html document with Meta Refresh tag (for exact codes go to website in Author Box below) named REDIRECT (or whatever name you choose) in your websites' root folder (or any other folder). Then just use a link to this document as your cloaked affiliate link on your website.
For example:
Http://www.yourdomain.com/redirect.html
or Http://www.yourdomain.com/otherfolder/redirect.html
Affiliate Link Cloaking using PHP
This method is similar to HTML one. But its much quicker and much less code. (Again, for exact code go to website in Author Box Below) Use this if your server supports php scripts.
Basically, follow same steps as with the HTML method, but instead of creating a html document create a txt file and rename it to redirect.php
Then just use a link to this file as your cloaked url.
Affiliate Link Cloaking using PHP and URL REWRITE
This is a more advanced method that allows to cloak multiple affiliate links to different products using one php file. However, it involves making changes to your .htaccess file. This file is usually situated in your websites root folder. If you don't have one, then i suggest you google it to know what it is and how to use it.
You will need to create a link.php file with a list of your affiliate links and give each link a unique ID. Then you will also have to add 2 lines of code to your .htaccess file.
Then if you need a cloaked link to one of your products you just use:
http://www.yourdomain.com/link.php?id=LinkID
For exact codes and complete step-by-step instructions visit Affiliate Link Cloaking
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