If you are an affiliate marketer you probably wondering why you never make any sales. Maybe your are not even aware that some people steal them from right under your nose. But how can that be - it’s easy really. If you are like most people promoting clickbank as an affiliate marketer, then those in the know will simply replace your clickbank id with theirs when they are about to purchase a product from your site. What this means for you is two things.

1. You won’t get a commission as the sale is officially going to the buyer who stole your link
2. You will get very frustrated and eventually give up altogether on affiliate marketing

Either way it isn’t a very nice experience for you. But there is a way to cloak your links quite easily provided you have your own web hosting.

If you don’t, then there is still ways to circumnavigate this issue by cloaking your links with an URL shortener. Instead of having an ugly URL that would read like

http://www.vendor.com/12grus?=xxxx or similar, you could have one that reads

http://doiop.com/blogging

This is in my eyes still not the best option as it screams affiliate but looks better than the first option anyway.

The following 4 sites allow you to cloak your link for free:

1. Diop - you can cloak your link by choosing your keyword.
2. Tiny URL - create a tiny URL from a long and ugly one, the downside of this site is that most good URL’s are already taken
3. Read This URL - with this one you can even tag the links
4. Memurl - Lets you create a mnemonic URL that looks like this http://memurl.com/kusipe

These cloaking helpers should however only be used, when you don’t have your own hosting - e.g. your site/blog is on a free platform.

A much better way to install a redirect link is via .htaccess. To do this, you will need to navigate through your CPanel to - File Manager - public_html - .htaccess - click on edit file - then put in the following code:

Redirect /recommends http://www.youraffiliatelink.com

What this will do in effect is to redirect the affiliate link from your website with the extension of the folder name you gave it. In my case the folder name is “recommends”. So the link I would advertise would be

http://www.bloggingweb20.com/recommends instead of the ugly looking affiliate link. Make sure that you leave one space between your “Redirect” and the backslash (/) as well as between your folder name and the beginning of the URL.

Naturally, there are even more ways to cloak your affiliate links, but for now we will leave it at that as it will keep you busy in learning new things. (For those who didn’t know this)

Keep your eyes out for Part 2 of this series.

To your Success

Monika Mundell Creator and Author of Blogging Web 2.0

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Filed under: Internet Marketing