WHY HIDE AFFILIATE LINKS
If you are an affiliate marketer and you hope to make money online, then knowing how to properly cloak and hide your affiliate links is a skill that is an absolute must. There are many reasons for this:
Average Internet surfer, who is the type of person who is going to make purchases through your affiliate links, a raw, bare, affiliate link is scary and suspicious. Think about it. If you are on a website about training dogs and they recommend a product about housebreaking, when you hover over the link you expect to see something like http://www.puppytraining.com or something normal looking like that. NOT http://sfj383kskkj3394340lsdlfllsdfe.hop.clickbank.net.
If the visitor knows the link is an affiliate link they won't click it. It's psychological. People hate the idea you are going to make money off of them. They will instead copy and paste the name of the product into a search and find it without you getting your commission.
To the paranoid internet surfer they will automaticall assume the link is really malware like a trojan or virus.
The affiliate link hiding techniques presented on this web page make it so your affiliate links are stored in one file which is very nice for maintainence. If any of the affiliate companies goes out of business or decides to terminate their affiliate program (this is happening a lot now) you can simply go to the file where your affiliate links are and make a simple edit.
Three Ways to Hide Affiliate Links
There are three ways to hide and cloak your affiliate links
ID PHP LINK CLOAKING: the way this type of link hiding works is you have a php file which contains a list of ID's and associated affiliate urls. The syntax of creating a link this way is http://www.site.com/visit.php?id=12
HTACCESS LINK CLOAKING: this is very similar to above. All your affiliate links are stored in a single htaccess file. Each line has the cloaked or fake url with the associate affiliate link. When the user clicks the fake link they are automatically redirected to the affiliate url.
IFRAME LINK CLOAKING: not really recommended any more for a variety of reasons. The two biggest reasons are that a lot of affiliate networks prohit this and an affiliate cookie dropped via a frame is a third party cookie which a lot of web browsers are set to block.
How to do ID PHP LINK CLOAKING
Here is the code syntax for ID PHP LINK CLOAKING:
elseif ($id == "linkcloaking") {$link = "http://www.whatispedia.info/business/whatis-linkcloaking.htm";}
For each affiliate link you wish to cloak you insert a line of code like that replacing linkcloaking with anything you wish, could be any word or number, just as long as it is meaningful to you.
There is a 100% FREE tool for automating this and not having to worry about coding. Free PHP ID AFFILIATE LINK CLOAKER TOOL. Below is a picture of this tool.
How to do HTACCESS LINK CLOAKING
HTACCESS LINK CLOAKING also involves storing all affiliate links and associated fake links in a single file. The command for this is:
Redirect /linkcloaking http://www.whatispedia.info/business/whatis-linkcloaking.htm
For each link you wish to cloak you create a separate line of code like the above which contains the command Redirect followed by a space followed by a fake directory on your web server which serves as the cloaked link follow by a space followed by the affiliate link.
There is a 100% FREE HTACCESS LINK CLOAKING TOOL which can take care of all the particulars for you. FREE HTACCESS LINK CLOAKER. An image of this free tool is shown below.
Frame or Iframe Link Cloaking and Hiding
FRAME LINK CLOAKING involves opening a iframe, which is basically another web browser window, within the main browser window. For the purpose of hiding affiliate links this is done in a manner so that the frame fills the entire browser window with its borders hidden so the website visitor has no idea there is a frame in the first place.
Below is the basic code to pull this off. Make sure to replace YOUR TITLE with what you want the website visitor to see in their web browser title bar and AFFILIATE LINK with the affiliate link.
There is also a free tool you can use that automates this called the FRAMES LINK CLOAKING TOOL
Below is an image of this free frames link cloaking tool.