Blogging Web 2.0

Affiliate Link Cloaking - Part 2

Posted on October 21, 2007
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing | Leave a Comment

In the last post of affiliate link cloaking we looked at ways to disguise your affiliate links, so that they are not that obvious on the initial glance. It was the simplest method of all, but also the one most beginners choose once they become aware of affiliate links being hijacked by others to keep the commission themselves.

In the end, it is certain that to allow for maximum affiliate commission retention, we need to cloak our links and make them look more pleasing to the eye. All the big marketers do this all the time. In this portion of our affiliate link cloaking series we will look at even more ways to disguise our links.

However, to do this part you will need to have your site hosted on a server. It won’t work with free domains such as blogger.com or even wordpress.com

The following code can be copied and pasted into notepad. Simply choose which Clickbank affiliate product you would like to sell by doing a search on Clickbank’s marketplace. Just remember to name the notepad html file with the name of the actual product. I.E. if you are trying to sell “blogging success” you will name the file “blogging success” without the quotation marks as an html file. This will make you affiliate link more official looking. Once it is uploaded on your domain you advertise it by using the URL http://YourDomain/Blogging_Sucess.html

You will also need to replace the AFFILIATE part of the URL below with your Clickbank ID, the same applies to the PUBLISHER part. There you need to insert the actual name of the product publisher.

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<title>Loading…Affiliate Builder.com</title>
<META HTTP-EQUIV=”Refresh” <CONTENT=”0;URL=http://AFFILIATE.PUBLISHER.hop.clickbank.net”>
</HEAD>
<body><P> </P></body>
</HTML>

Paste this code in notepad and save it as an html file and upload it to your server and use that address instead of your hoplink.
ie… http://YourDomain.com/Your_product.html

This method should then redirect your visitor if they click onto your link to your affiliate product link. It is a better way than the free options as it does look more professional already.

Keep your eyes posted for Part 3 of this series. You will learn even more ways to disguise your affiliate links and before you know it, you will be a skilled master.

Monika Mundell Creator and Author of Blogging Web 2.0

Technorati Tags: affiliate marketing , affiliate link cloaking , affiliate , clickbank marketing , cloaking your links , blogging web 2.0

Technorati Tags: affiliate link cloaking, affiliate marketing, Blogging, blogging web 2.0, marketing

Hello, if you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Comments

Affiliate Link Cloaking Part 1

Posted on September 24, 2007
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing | 1 Comment

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.

You won’t get a commission as the sale is officially going to the buyer who stole your link
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:

Diop - you can cloak your link by choosing your keyword.
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
Read This URL - with this one you can even tag the links
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