New to Affliate Marketing: Cloaking Links

Cloaking, or hiding the real link, is a technique so that your affiliate links
look clean and void of url parameters which might intentionally or not
be removed resulting in lost commissions for you.

For instance, and affiliate link may look something like this:

http://www.theproduct.com?aff_id=221100

The number on the end of the string represents your affiliate id. The vendor then knows that you referred the visitor to their website. If the person buys then, you get the commission.

Unfortunately, some unscrupulous web surfers like to remove the affiliate id at the end of the url and still purchase the product, but rob you of a commission.

To improve the chances of that happening and also to make your link look nice, we use cloaking. So, in our example, the link would look something like this:

http://www.mywebsite.com/recommendsXX/

That would take the person to the same place but look how cleaner it looks and
it also avoids displaying your affiliate id. Now, I’m not saying that if the person
really wants to he can’t do it anyways. But, if it doesn’t look like an affiliate link,
there’s less chances that they will do it.

To set this up is pretty easy too. It takes about 5 minutes.

Step 1. Log into your website and create a folder called “recommendsXX” without the quotes. Replace the XX with a unique identifier that refers to the name of the product
you are selling like “recommendsaweber”

Step 2. In that folder, create a file called htaccess.txt

Step 3. In the file add these lines:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/*.* http://producturl.com/info.php?&aff_id=xxxx
IndexIgnore *

Replace the “http:….” with your actual affiliate link.

Step 4. Rename the file to “.htaccess” without the quotes. Yes, that’s a dot before the htaccess.

Your done! To test your link navigate to your URL with /recommendsXX/ and it will redirect to the affiliate product site.

Pretty neat, eh? (I’m Canadian)

Personally, I have so many links and I like to use a tool that does it all for me. It manages all my links and tracks clicks and referrers. It’s quite sophisticated.

If you want to take a look go to the link below:

http://www.digitalstork.com/recommendGTT/

Now, go cloak your affiliate links!

Frank Mamone

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