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

Just a quick post about another website that you can build mind maps on. I’m going to give mind meister a go tomorrow but there is one I have already used. It’s free, it’s easy and the website address is:

http://bubbl.us

Happy mind mapping!

Mark

Starting to catch up after a slow week. I joined Alex Jeffrey’s coaching program on launch day, so just got in! I was obviously excited and looking forward to the webinar and that’s when my broadband decide to go into meltdown

The connection went down about 3pm that day and it was a couple of days until it was sorted out, so not just Alex suffering technical difficulties!

Anyway, have been through Module 1 now and what can I say except wow! I wasn’t expecting over 2 hours of content when I pressed play. I might have been slumped over my laptop by the time it was finished but very happy.

Alex covered so much its hard to pick out the highlights as there are so many to choose from. If I had to choose just one message that made an impact on me it would have to be ’stop chasing the money’.

That seems a strange concept but it makes perfect sense. As I have mentioned in a previous post, I have only been at this for 3 months and can see I have been going down the wrong path. I have been working hard in that time, set up a website with some resell rights products and an eBay shop to generate some traffic. After listening to Alex I am now in the process of stripping that all back and starting again.

Does this frustrate me? No. Why?

I actually feel quite liberated by the fact I am not focusing on making some money but in building a business. I did have another blog on the go but I wasn’t being me, I was chasing the money. So that blogs gone, I’m starting again and it feels good.

I was about 2 months in when I decided I needed some coaching and I’m glad I made the decision. I decided to stop wasting money on ebooks and find some successful marketer’s that genuinely want to help people.

I decided to join two coaching course’s and by joining Alex’s I am now in two. The other?

John Thornhill.

I’m sure many of you have heard of John but if not, check out his blog here.

Like Alex, John has been very successful in building an online business. He also goes about this in very quiet and understated way. There is no bragging as you find with so many ’gurus’ just a desire to pass on what he has learnt. I can’t praise him highly enough and I feel very lucky to have found two great guys who offer fantastic content and who really seem to care.

I in week 4 of 16 with John and we are learning product creation so keep coming back here and I will post tips as I learn them.

As always, wishing success to us all

Mark