Cloaking Your Affiliate Links

If you are an affiliate marketer, you might want to consider cloaking your affiliate links for some of these reasons:

• Readers are more likely to click on clean links thus increasing your conversion rate.
• Normal affiliate links are long.
• Preventing other affiliates from hijacking your links.

You can replace long URLs with fast, short, server-side redirects, so that people won’t feel “pitched” and won’t be turned off by links that are obviously affiliate links. There are many ways to cloak your affiliate links. I’m going to cover 2 simplest method and easiest method.

Cloak Your Affiliate Links using .htaccess

Create a directory on your site called “go” (remember, you can always change the name according to your needs). In the “go” directory, create a directory for each of your affiliate links. For example, create a directory called “go” and a directory in the “go” directory called “norhafidz”. In the “norhafidz” directory, put a file called .htaccess — you can create it by using a plain text editor like notepad.

There should be a line in the .htaccess which look like this:

Redirect /go/norhafidz http://www.norhafidz.com/affialiate=?norhafidz

where http://www.yourdomain.com/go/norhafidz will be your new affiliate links and http://www.norhafidz.com/affialiate=?norhafidz is your initial affiliate links.

Note that, there should be 3 parts on .htaccess file on a line: Redirect command, the location of directory (/go/norhafidz) and the initial URL of your affiliate links (http://www.norhafidz.com/affialiate=?norhafidz). Each must be separated by a single space.

So, if you are giving out the url of http://yourdomain.com/go/norhafidz this will send people to http://www.norhafidz.com/affialiate=?norhafidz which is your initial affiliate links.

Cloak Your Affiliate Links using URL Redirection Sites

This method uses Redirection Sites to “change” your affiliate links. One of my favorite site is tinyurl.com. Once you are there, just enter your affiliate link and it will be shorten in a second!

Know of an even better method? Let us know!

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