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Affiliate Cloaking Question Please

by Craig Fenton
15 replies
Hi Weekend Warriors:

A question please about cloaking (Am I using the right term) affiliate links from Click Bank, Commission Junction, and Pay Dot Com.

For example (not real, as always made up. I'm plugging nothing)
if the link created was
http://blahhellonothingheretoplug.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=9Bnothingnothing

Would any self made change by using a hyperlink in an email text or Microsoft Word such as:

To enjoy nothing please visit this

give the proper credit to the affiliate if somebody clicks on it and purchases the product or is it not that simple and commissions could be lost if something is changed or not done in a very specific way.

Thank you as always for your time and have a great weekend!
#affiliate #cloaking #question
  • Profile picture of the author Jassim
    You don't lose your affiliate commission by cloaking the link like you said. The person who clicks on that link obviously redirects to the affiliate link only, you are just not showing the real link. There is no trick or specific ways to do this, there are lots of free software available in market for doing it very easily.
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    • Profile picture of the author Craig Fenton
      Hi Jassim:

      Thanks for quick reply. A follow-up question then is if I did it correctly what would the advantage even if free of having software do it. It only took a few seconds.

      Thank you for the info and be well always.
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  • Profile picture of the author vlabroo
    There are some free redirect scripts available. They are better in my opinion. They are on your server under your control and not on some one Else's server as is the case with free cloaking services.

    One place I know it is available is with Internet Success System. I think you can still join as a free member. But I am not 100 % sure. They have the redirect script in their member area.
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    • Profile picture of the author Craig Fenton
      Hi Valbroo:

      Thank you and enjoy the weekend!
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      • Profile picture of the author Kelvin Nikkel
        This is the method I use very successfully and it is 100% secure and foolproof.

        Take your link and go to acloaker.com. This is FREE.

        take the code that is generated from acloaker and paste it into
        a notepad.txt document. name it what the product is. For instance if
        the product was hotwheels you would name it hotwheels.txt

        open your ftp program and create a folder in your root directory.
        name this directory something like "recommends", "mychoices" or something
        that would tell the buyer that you recommend this item.

        upload your hotwheels.txt file to this directory

        rename your hotwheels.txt to hotwheels.html

        Put a link like <a href="http://yoursite.com/recommends/hotwheels.html">Hot Wheels</a>

        Now when your visitor goes to your link, the link will be displayed in the address bar as
        http://www.yoursite.com/recommends/hotwheels.html but they will be at your
        affiliates landing page. And if they bookmark this to come back to later to purchase,
        they have bookmarked YOUR link. Not your affiliates.

        Hope this helps.
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        • Profile picture of the author Ian Jackson
          Originally Posted by Kelvin Nikkel View Post

          This is the method I use very successfully and it is 100% secure and foolproof.

          Take your link and go to acloaker.com. This is FREE.

          take the code that is generated from acloaker and paste it into
          a notepad.txt document. name it what the product is. For instance if
          the product was hotwheels you would name it hotwheels.txt

          open your ftp program and create a folder in your root directory.
          name this directory something like "recommends", "mychoices" or something
          that would tell the buyer that you recommend this item.

          upload your hotwheels.txt file to this directory

          rename your hotwheels.txt to hotwheels.html

          Put a link like <a href="http://yoursite.com/recommends/hotwheels.html">Hot Wheels</a>

          Now when your visitor goes to your link, the link will be displayed in the address bar as
          http://www.yoursite.com/recommends/hotwheels.html but they will be at your
          affiliates landing page. And if they bookmark this to come back to later to purchase,
          they have bookmarked YOUR link. Not your affiliates.

          Hope this helps.
          Ok, just put my URL into their box, and was directed to three download buttons. Downloaded all three. I was not presented with any code - or put another way, I don't understand what I'm being given.

          In my file I now have three downloads;

          a green web editor icon, which goes to my "Dreamweaver" software (when I open it, there's an empty page - ready for corying/pasting the script I assume)

          And two IE icons going to the product to which I'm afiliated; one entitled "redirect forwarding" and the other "redirect with hidden URL".

          I have no idea what I'm supposed to do next; please advise, thanks.
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  • Profile picture of the author GeorgR.
    it works as long as YOUR id is used in a proper hoplink format,

    that is: YOURID.vendor.hop.clickbank.net

    by the way, the "TID" is only a tracking parameter four your statistics!

    Why do you want to cloak/hide your afflinks?

    a) Google might not like sites with obvious affiliate links. Have a site with "hop.clickbank" links laced....not only does it look BAD...google might downrank your site as being "spammy"

    b) people see your link and can just replace "YOURID" with "THEIR_ID" if they are signed up with clickbank. You would lose any comission, and the other person gets up to 75% back to his OWN clickbank account, so he got a god deal on something. Sadly, this is possible and not even against clickbank TOS.

    To avoid such things, dont use a standard clickbank link in the first place.

    The other issue, mainly for PPC (AdWords), again, Google "hates" all affiliates, so if you can make an add with only your hoplink consider you VERY lucky. Its against Google Adwords TOS.

    You are supposed to have your own landing page and not just use an afflink and promote a "3rd party product".

    And to the OP:

    You really didn't change anything, its the same link/URL. You just changed the description as it appears, but the URL is the same, and that's what counts.

    Doesnt matter whether i use http://here876.maverick66.hop.clickbank.net
    or Make Money or Maverick Money Makers Makes Millionaires
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  • Profile picture of the author GeorgR.
    simplest method:

    Fire up notepad,

    and write (EXAMPLE!!)

    <?php
    header("Location: http://here876.maverick66.hop.clickbank.net");
    ?>
    Save this as "product_name.php" to your site. Then just call this from your site like yoursite.com/product_name.php or whatever name you renamed the file.

    Or make a subdomain like yourproduct.mysite.com and put the very same thing on there just name it INDEX.PHP

    Then you can just refer to the subdomain like http://maverick.mirabits.com (example , here i amde a subdomain "maverick") and visitor automatically gets redirected to whatever is in that file. (Since index.php is loaded by default).

    Now, you can use this simple method wherever you want to drop your links, but i do NOT recommend this for G. AdWords!! AdWords is another story.
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    -> VISIT www.1UP-SEO.com *** <- Internet Marketing, SEO Tips, Reviews & More!! ***
    *** HIGH QUALITY CONTENT CREATION +++ Manual Article Spinning (Thread Here) ***
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    • Profile picture of the author Ian Jackson
      Originally Posted by GeorgR. View Post

      simplest method:

      Fire up notepad,

      and write (EXAMPLE!!)

      Save this as "product_name.php" to your site. Then just call this from your site like yoursite.com/product_name.php or whatever name you renamed the file.

      Or make a subdomain like yourproduct.mysite.com and put the very same thing on there just name it INDEX.PHP

      Then you can just refer to the subdomain like Maverick Money Makers™ | The Original Money Making Club Since 1997 (example , here i amde a subdomain "maverick") and visitor automatically gets redirected to whatever is in that file. (Since index.php is loaded by default).

      Now, you can use this simple method wherever you want to drop your links, but i do NOT recommend this for G. AdWords!! AdWords is another story.
      I'm using the first part, rather than the subdomain. Doesn't seem to be working ([Hostgator cPanel] error 404).

      Please could you, or anyone, expand upon this in terms of a step-by-step method using Dreamweaver 8, thanks.

      (Do disrespect George; posted question on main forum too)
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    • Profile picture of the author Ian Jackson
      Originally Posted by GeorgR. View Post

      simplest method:

      Fire up notepad,

      and write (EXAMPLE!!)

      Save this as "product_name.php" to your site. Then just call this from your site like yoursite.com/product_name.php or whatever name you renamed the file.

      Or make a subdomain like yourproduct.mysite.com and put the very same thing on there just name it INDEX.PHP

      Then you can just refer to the subdomain like Maverick Money Makers™ | The Original Money Making Club Since 1997 (example , here i amde a subdomain "maverick") and visitor automatically gets redirected to whatever is in that file. (Since index.php is loaded by default).

      Now, you can use this simple method wherever you want to drop your links, but i do NOT recommend this for G. AdWords!! AdWords is another story.


      A step further !! I can get a webpage now . However, the url shows up as "http://www.mysite.com/product.shtml?hop=myID" ....

      I saved it - the example script above - in notepad as product.php, but it defaults to the green "d" (DWeaver) icon in my folder, rather than a notepad one. This then obvously uploads (by default) as a DWeaver8 file. Anything else I'm doing wrong?
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      • Profile picture of the author scottparat
        Hi Craig

        I can empathize with your questions and desire to get a handle on cloaking, redirects, frames...you name it.

        One thing a cloaking/redirect script does is give you control of your links. Lets say you have a report that goes viral.....you have 1000's of copies of that report out. In that report you have a specific affiliate link you are promoting that is directly from clickbank.

        You're making money hand over fist, then all of a sudden the affiliate program you're promoting disappears, it no longer is available. So, you have 1000's of copies of your report with non-working affilate links. Basically at this point you are screwed.

        If you used a script to redirect and maybe cloak that affiliate link, you have complete control of that link, all you would have to do is change to location of the redirect on your server and your report would still have active affiliate links.

        This is one of the biggest advantages of using some type of method to manage your affiliate links. And the good news is you can do this with a simple php redirect.

        Code:
        <?php header("Location: http://www.youraffiliatelink.com"); ?>
        Put that code in an empty notepad file and save it with any name you want with a .php extension. So you would name it "mylink.php".....save it.....upload it to your server. Then the url would be www.yoursite.com/mylink.php and this url would go to youraffiliatelink.com .....hope that makes some sense to you.....sometimes you just have to try it in order to get a handle on how it works.

        Anyway, another warrior by the name of Alan Peterson has a nice guide that really explains some of your options when it comes to redirects and cloaking....I think its only 10 bucks and you really should get it......it will help you begin to understand what everyone is talking about.

        http://www.warriorforum.com/warrior-...fused-ask.html

        Check out Alan's Guide.....I know it will help you.

        Good luck to you

        Scott
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        • Profile picture of the author Ian Jackson
          OK, more progress. Changed "open with" properties to notepad, so in spite of the Dweaver icon in my file, it opens nicely in notepad now.

          However, once uploaded, I still get "http://www.mysite.com/product.shtml?hop=myID" showing in my address bar.

          (Would love to buy the product mentioned above, but my Wife's on my case re how much I'm spending on IM ; I've no ROI yet )
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  • Profile picture of the author GeorgR.
    this should really work with all PHP/Host configurations. Might be the editor used as pjc said.
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    -> VISIT www.1UP-SEO.com *** <- Internet Marketing, SEO Tips, Reviews & More!! ***
    *** HIGH QUALITY CONTENT CREATION +++ Manual Article Spinning (Thread Here) ***
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  • Profile picture of the author RedMatrix
    Ian, I gave some good info on this not 2 hours ago...
    I need serious help!
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    ~Dave

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