How To Cloak Your Affiliate Links (And Why You Should)

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Not every affiliate does this... But you'll be glad you did.

In the world of affiliate marketing there two different types of people you'll want to "hide" your affiliate link from.

#1 - The Technologically Unsavvy.

Both you and I know that affiliate links are often long and quite "ugly". When confronted with a particularly long link - especially when it includes a lot of characters that aren't identifiable as something related to where the link is supposed to be taking them.

The unsavvy web surfer may get the impression that your link is threatening. Some users think that these long, unsightly links will attempt to infect their computer with malicious software and steer clear.
This has a negative impact on sales for a pretty obvious reson - they won't click!

#2 - Unsavoury Affiliates.

There are those out there who would like to earn their own commission on the products you're suggesting.

Say you're promoting a clickbank product which uses the link format:

http://AFFILIATE.VENDOR.hop.clickbank.net

It's really simple for them to simply remove your affiliate code and input their own - giving themselves a "rebate" or "discount" of 50%+ for making the sale to themselves and leaving you with nothing to show for your investment in getting the offer to them in the first place!

How To Overcome The Issue.

Okay so how can we solve this problem?

There are two methods that I know of - one of them is free and labour intensive on our part and the other is paid and thus much easier.

The Free method.


If you're using a PHP based website and want to "cloak" your ugly affiliate links or clean up long outbound links, you can do so using the following strategy!

Open a text editing program like wordpad.

Copy the following into that text editing program and then save it as something like "SecureRedirect.php" or "Go.php" or... whatever you like that won't sound threatening to your unsavvy visitors.

PHP Code:
<?php
  $id 
$_GET['id'];
  
$links = array(
    
"First Redirect Here" => "http://YourLongAndUnsightlyAffiliateLinkHere",
    
"Example Site Here" => "http://www.example.com/affiliateid",
    
"Official Site Name Here" => "http://www.RedirectLinkHere.com/affiliateid"
    
);    
  
header("Location:".$links[$id]);
  exit;
?>
Using the above PHP command, we can make our links point to this file to learn where they're supposed to send the clicker.

To make this work, we upload the file above to the root directory of our website (for the shortest links).

Be sure you edit the values in the quotes to reflect your own site. For instance, you might link to an unsightly clickbank hop link like this:

PHP Code:
"PregnancyMiracleOfficialSite" => http://917f4wxie13p-g7l58l8kjy-dt.hop.clickbank.net/]Pregnancy Miracleâ„¢ - Cure Infertility and Get Pregnant Naturally 
When someone hovers their mouse over the link, what they'll see is where we're sending them, which is to the .php file we created so we can redirect them from there.
Like this:

[url=http://yourdomain.com/secureredirect.php?id=PregnancyMiracleOfficialSite[/url]

This is not the most sophisticated method of cleaning up your links, but it is free.
In case that wasn't 100% clear, your PHP file would look like this:

PHP Code:
<?php
  $id 
$_GET['id'];
  
$links = array(
    
"PregnancyMiracleOfficialSite" => "http://917f4wxie13p-g7l58l8kjy-dt.hop.clickbank.net/",
    
"Example Site Here" => "http://www.example.com/affiliateid"
    
);    
  
header("Location:".$links[$id]);
  exit;
?>
To be absolutely sure I've clarified - you'll be linking to the PHP file you created like this http://yourdomain.com/secureredirect...LinkTitleHere] to achieve the link cloak, not the original URL.

Adrian that was a lot of effort - What's the advantage to this over a link shortening site like bit.ly?

I'm glad you asked!

If you create videos (And you should probably consider it...) referring to a shortened link is often difficult to say the least.

Would you rather tell people to go to...

http://bit.ly/x9PTqv
or
http://yoursite.com/go.php/anothersite ?

One is much easier to remember than the other.

Of course you could take this to the next level with the paid product...


The PAID Method.

If the stuff above is jibberish to you I'd definitely recommend checking this out.

The program I recommend based on my own experience with it is called "Easy Redirect Script". I've used it myself on my own sites and it's really quite straight forward to use which is great.

You can learn more about it easyredirectscript.com so I won't get too much into it here.

It (obviously) offers more advanced features beyond just simply changing what users see when they hover over your links so if you're looking for more flexibility with your link cloaking this is also a great thing to check out.




About The Author
Adrian In't Veldt is an author, speaker and entrepreneur from Ontario, Canada. In the past he's worked with local school boards, operated an offline consulting practice and spoken at many seminars regarding financial planning. Today, Adrian operates a microbusiness from home so he can spend more time with his girlfriend and pet turtles.

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