How to Hide Affiliate Links

It is sometimes necessary to hide, or cloak, your affiliate links to stop people stealing your commission or bypassing the affiliate link and going straight to the main site.

Some people will also replace your affiliate link with their own so that they receive the commission, this is know as link hijacking.

The other advantages to hiding affiliate links are that if people see your link in a post or email, they just won’t click it just because of the affiliate connection, hiding links WILL increase your CTR (Click Through Ratio), also, as I mentioned in an earlier post ( see How To Get Top Search Engine Rankings With Article Marketing ) many/most article directories won’t accept articles that contain affiliate links.

Please note: Some article directories such as ezinearticles.com will not even allow redirects or cloaked links, in this instance you will need to send people to your own website page, free blog or lens, that has your offer on that includes your affiliate links. This is another good reason to have your own domain (see Cheap affiliate web hosting companies ).

The quickest way to hide your links is to use a company like tinyurl.com which is free to use and turns links like http://www.YourUglyAffiliateLink.com/?12345 into something like this http://tinyurl.com/35q7rl, however this is only really a quick fix and is better to be used for mailing your opt-in lists, the people who trust you, people who don’t know you can’t tell where that link is going to take them, it could be a porn site for all they know, you will get better click through rates using another method.

IMPORTANT: Some link cloaking techniques may prevent some sites from dropping tracking cookies into your visitors computer which means you may not get credit for that referral. Check all links to make sure they work correctly!
Link redirection using a php script

If you have your own website you can hide your links by setting up a page redirect.

All you have to do is to just insert this one line of code into a php file:-



You can name your php file to anything you want, for example, great-bargains.php, so your actual link would be YourWebsite/great-bargains.php which will redirect to the site you are promoting.
Hide your affiliate links using a zero-frame code

This technique has a little more code than above, but it actually frames the site you are promoting.

Again, you will need your own website to use this technique but it’s just as easy to do.

The following code frames the site you are promoting making it look to the visitor as if they are still on your site, in other words, no matter which page they go to on the framed site they will only see your domain in the browser window.

Regards,
Alleshopz.com