3 Ways To Cloak Your Affiliate Links
If you’re an affiliate marketer, you’re probably aware that there are people out there who don’t want you to get your commission. They don’t care about the time you spent getting traffic to your offer. They don’t care how much money you spent on ads to get people to the sales page. All they care about is getting a discount for themselves.
Most people won’t try to steal your commission from you. And the sad fact is that if someone wants to bypass your affiliate link, there’s not much you can do about it. But you can make it more difficult for them. Here are three ways you can cloak your links…
1. Use a service that will cloak your link for you.
There are a few free ones out there, such as freelinkcloaker.com and tiny url.com. All you have to do is enter your affiliate link, click a button, and you’ll get a new link that is shorter. There’s no way anyone could guess what product the link is going to. You can use the link on your web pages, in your emails, and on your blog. When someone clicks on the link, they will be redirected to the sales page of the product you’re promoting.
The problem with using these services is that if they go out of business, your links will stop working. A few months ago, this happened to me. I’m not saying that it will happen to you, and I am not against these services, I’m just pointin out that if it does happen, you have to go to all of the pages and email messages where the link was used and replace it with one that works.
So if you’re going to use these services, only use the links where it would be easy to replace them. You probably wouldn’t want to use them in an ebook or report that you’re giving away or selling, or in articles that you submit. If the links stop working, there’s no way for you to fix the problem.
2. Link Cloaking Software.
There is software that you can purchase that will cloak your links for you. They usually require you to have a web hosting account so you can upload the cloaked pages to your site. Since the links are controlled by you, you don’t have to worry that your links will stop working.
3. PHP and HTML Redirects.
You can hide your links yourself using a redirect. A redirect is a page that you link to that immediately redirects to another page, in this case the sales page.
You can find the code for redirects by doing a search for “PHP Redirect Script” and “HTML Redirect Script”. The code is free, and it’s just a few lines of code that you insert into a new web page. Replace the url in the code with your affiliate link, and save the page.
For example, you’re promoting Google Cash. You create a page called googlecash.html, or googlecash.php. The link you would create to get people to the sales page would be www.yoursite.com/googlecash.html
People would click on the link, and be redirected to the sales page. Since you control the redirect page, you don’t have to worry about your links not working. If Google Cash uses a different affiliate link, or you decide to promote something else in its place, replace the web address in your redirect page, and all of your links will redirect to the new product.
You should always, always cloak your affiliate links. How you decide to do it is up to you. I’ve shown you 3 ways to do it. So there’s no reason for you to neglect doing it. To your affiliate marketing success…
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