[FREE] How To Cloak And Protect Your Affiliate Links

If you don't cloak your affiliate links properly you lose money simply by not giving your affiliate link URL the respect it deserves! You should think of your affiliate links as business assets and try to protect and maximize their potential.

By not cloaking your links you're making it easy for your readers to replace your affiliate id with their own and have you lose the commission. Affiliates who don't cloak their links usually lose up to %78 of their commissions.

How To Cloak And Protect Your Affiliate Links

Very nice write-up with some good information. I started using the php redirects after watching a similar webinar with Jason a couple of years ago. You can see the format that I have used in the affiliate links in my sig. This was a good refresher for me.

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Originally Posted by wink0r

Very nice write-up with some good information. I started using the php redirects after watching a similar webinar with Jason a couple of years ago. You can see the format that I have used in the affiliate links in my sig. This was a good refresher for me.

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i agree use php redirect or meta refresh if dont have any knowledge in redirecting ^_^

you re correct dude...........................cloaking the affiliate link really increase the sales..............

Cheers

Has anyone used the google URL shortener? (goo.gl) and is it OK to use.

I'm afraid I had difficulty with the php redirect method outlined by ioan dranicia. I'm not very techie. I tried to follow your instructions ioan but after uploading the code my aff link stayed the same.

I really want to mask my aff links but not sure how.

Thanks

I went over the article and it made perfect sense to me, but I have been using the method for a couple of years so I may have read between the lines.

It sounds like you did not change the link on your page. If you are updating an existing link you would need to do that.

This is a two step process:
1) paste the redirect code Ioan showed with your affiliate link replacing the 'YOUR_AFFILIATE_URL_HERE' in a text editor file and name it appropriately with a .php extension (notepad works fine for this).
2) in place of your affiliate link on your page link to your redirect file. In the case of a banner ad you will need to pick out just the part that is the affiliate link and replace it with a link to your redirect file. For a contextual ad link just link directly to your redirect file. I keep my redirect links in a directory named 'go_to' so the visible link at the bottom of the page when you hover over the link has the format of mysite.com/go_to/destinationlink.php. You can see that in the affiliate links in my sig.