How To Cloak Affiliate Links

Posted: September 16th, 2009 | Filed under: How-To Comment

Unless you are selling and/or promoting your own product, then 99% of the time you are going to be using an affiliate link to make money online online.

An affiliate link is a special url address that embeds some type of code with the link that lets a company give you credit for any sales made through that link. For the most part, an affiliate link looks like so:

As more and more companies start to adapt the affiliate model and technology allows for more specific tracking, affiliate links have gotten even more complicated:

Cloaking allows you to cover up any affiliate links as well as shorten any long-string affiliate links you may have.

Reasons to cloak your affiliate links. While many visitors will happily click on links, there are also many users that will check that status bar to see what the link points to. If they can tell it is an affiliate link or don’t trust the URL, then they’ll end up directly typing in the URL into their address bar, thus voiding any chance of getting credit for that particular sale.

How to cloak links

If you are using an affiliate link on your blog or website, then you can use something simple like Ninja Affiliate; however, if you want to get even more sneaky, then why not just create a whole new domain?

If your affiliate program is a muscle building product, then register a domain such as easybodybuilding.com and redirect to your affiliate product.

You can be fun with these because you’re only using them to redirect. You can see how these clear domains look more friendly to clicks.

With more people using video to promote and build traffic, many of sites like YouTube don’t allow you to use HTML, so you are required to put in your affiliate link as so. Sure you could shorten or do something else, but people can still tell its an affiliate link. The same can be said for affiliate links on your website.

By creating a whole new domain and easily setting up a redirect to your affiliate link, nobody will have a clue that you are sending them to an affiliate product. Thanks to sites like GoDaddy registering domain names have never been so easy and quick to setup. Not to mention as inexpensive.

Because I host with them, I like to use HostMonster to register my domains.

Everyday people are unaware of how much money they miss out on because their affiliate id is being stripped out of the URL. By cloaking them, you assure yourself the potential of higher commissions.

Using subdomains for affiliate link cloaking

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