Link cloaking is a method to conceal the actual URL address being displayed. So why would we want to cloak our affiliate links? Here are a couple of reasons:

  • Link Hijacking - If your affiliate links are un-cloaked, it is possible for people to remove your affiliate ID and substitute it with their own, stealing your hard earned commission.
  • Link Bypassing - Many visitors to websites, especially those outside the Internet marketing niche, get nervous when they see long ugly links. Other people will just hover over the link, copy it into their browser, remove your affiliate id and go direct to the top level of the domain address. Why? Who knows, they may think a long link is insecure or that the product must cost them more if someone is making a commission.
  • Better Conversion/Sales - As well as avoiding any of the problems above, cloaked links are more tidy, professional and will improve your click through rate.

So how do you cloak your affiliate links?

There are many ways of doing this - link cloaking, link redirection, third party link cloaking providers and link cloaking software/scripts.

Rather than go into all of them I will just show you one of the easiest, link redirection. Here is what you want to do:

  1. Go to your hosting account and your blog domain. Create a new folder, you can call this whatever you like but most people go with ‘recommends’. This folder name will form part of the displayed URL, for example: yourdomainname.com/recommends/productx.php.
  2. Open your text editor (i.e. Notepad) and copy and paste the following code into it:<?php
    header( ‘location: http://www.YourAffiliateLinkHere.com’ );
    ?>
  3. Replace YourAfilliateLinkHere.com with your actual affiliate link that you want to redirect to.
  4. Now you have done that save the file with the .php file extension. That is very important, make sure you don’t save as .txt file. Only files saved with the .php extension will work. As an example, if you were promoting hostgator, save the file as hostgator.php
  5. Now upload this to your server, either by FTP or in Cpanel and place it in the recommends folder you created in stage one.
  6. That’s it! So now when you are recommending a product on your blog, or anywhere else, just enter the target URL as follows:http://yourdomainname.com/recommends/productname.php

     Dont forget to add .php!

I hope I’ve explained that well enough, but if you have any problems or need more info, just leave a comment.

Mark