How To Cloak Website Links For Dummies

Affiliate URL highjacking costs affiliates alot of hard earned cash, a few folks will exchange your associate URL to their own prior to buying any merchandise in order they themselves get paid the commission giving them a discounted product. You need to mask associate links.

This trouble is worsened if you are advertising to the associate marketers bunch as they can spot an associate/associate URL from 100 yards away! They will just substitute your associate ID with their own and “highjack” your commissions.

Some people just simply hate the thought that you will make a commission from their buy and will merely chop off the associate ID at the end of your URL. Whenever you do not carry out steps to try and conceal your associate URL from highjackers, and so you’ll continue to lose commissions.

Hiding your associate links not only helps you make more money, but is also good for SEO. Hiding your associate links with a URL that looks like it goes to somewhere in your website is far more attractive for someone to click. Hiding your associate code - and increasing your click-throughs.

What this means is that when they click on a cloaked URL they still go to the correct web address but the genuine location of the associate/sales page is completely hidden from the potential customer and vitally so is your associate username. Finally, once the user arrives at the actual associate URL, it’s actual location is entirely hidden. It’s generally best to have the URL hidden behind text as this helps to protect your associate id and in general appears better than a commonly long ugly associate URL.

Using a redirect php script to hide links

This is an easy process to carry out, all you’ve to do is produce a single php file that includes a small piece of computer code, so whenever you’re attempting to advertise http://yourID.merchID.hop.clickbank.net then you would produce a blank page called, say, discounts.php that just incorporates the redirect script, so the actual URLyou promote would be http://www.yoursite/discounts.

Regrettably this formula does have one drawback, a few associate merchant URL will still be in view in the web browser address bar, it works great with clickbank products however.

Using .htaccess to hide Affiliate links

This is acts very much the same way as the technique mentioned above except you don’t involve any scripts, you only need to include a line of code to your .htaccess file.

As with the redirection script above, just create a blank page and upload it to your host, and then add the following line of code to your .htaccess file.

Regrettably this has the same drawbacks as the redirect script method, your associate link[/spin] could still be apparent on the merchants web site in the web browser address bar.

Using a zero-frame to cloak links

This is the cloaking method I use most often to hide associate URL.

Utilizing this technique makes it appear as though you’re directing people to a page on YOUR site, even your domain will however be seeable in the address bar opposed to the above cloaking methods, people will still think they’re on your web site but they’re in reality looking at the merchants site.

You merely produce a page as mentioned above and enter some lines of code, I also add a meta tag title to fit the description of the merchandise I’m selling.

All the same, you MUST test your links prior to promoting it! This technique can effect the tracking on some sites, so make sure that you will be getting credit for all the traffic you send their way.

How to cloak links in a web browser

This method is applied on your website so that whenever somebody hovers over your URL, they do not see the real web site address in their web browser status bar.

So if your genuine hyperlink was www - affiliateproduct.com/uglyaffiliatelink?123 they’d just see www.yoursite.com in their web browser.

And so there you have them, 4 easy ways to hide or cloak your associate links, using these methods will for certain step-up your associate sales and cut down on URL hijacking.

If you aren’t using any methods to conceal your associate hyperlinks then I can assure that you’re losing associate commissions! You must protect yourself from these hijackers, the more arduous you make it for people to distinguish an associate hyperlink, the more commission you’ll attain.

Get all the code you need to mask associate links for free at Affiliate marketing for dummies.