How To Cloak Your Affiliate Links ?

Affiliate links are usually pretty long (and ugly !!!!). Cloaking an affiliate link means hiding those ugly long links and replacing it with small and simple links. Behind the simple link will lie the ugly, long click – but the user can’t see it. You will basically replace your long, ugly, external link with a small, simple internal link. This is one of the reasons why any affiliate marketers cloak their affiliate links.

Apart from the ‘looking good’ reason there are two more important reasons why you should cloak your affiliate links - To Avoid Link Bypassing Ease Of Change

To Avoid Link Bypassing
If you use the affiliate link without cloaking it, then some of the users will not be comfortable using an affiliate link – they might feel that they will get better support if they deal with the merchant directly or they might just not want someone to earn a commission over their purchase – whatever their reason might be, these people will try and avoid your affiliate link. Instead, they will place the mouse over your affiliate link, this will display the link on the status bar – they will type the link into their address box without the affiliate parameter added. As a result, you have lost your commission though they made their purchase after visiting your web page.

Ease Of Change
Quite often merchants change their affiliate links. If they do this, you have to replace your old link with the new one at every place you used an affiliate link to that merchant.

For example: I have links to HostMonster at many places – I mean on many pages over all my websites. If I don’t cloak links, if HostMonster changes their link, I will have to go change links at all places – Sending shivers down my throat just thinking about it !!!

By cloaking, I change my link at just one place – in my hostmonster.html file (Explained below).

There are number of ways to cloak your links – some use cloaking software, some use htaccess files and me – I use the simple and super simple method. Here is what I do:

1. I create one text file for each merchant
2. I paste the following code in the file :
   

   [html]
   [head]
   [title]Untitled Document[/title]
   [meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"]

   [meta HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH" content="0; url=place your affiliate link here"]
   [/head]

   [body]
   [/body]
   [/html]

   I replace the words ‘place your affiliate link here’ with my affiliate link. Also, make sure you replace all [ and ] with < and >

3. I give the file a name (something I can associate with the merchant) – And I save the file with html extension (example – hostmonster.html)
4. I upload it to my server

That’s it I am done. I only create one file for each merchant. I store all my affiliate text files in one place on my hard drive. This way, if I am recommending this merchant on a different website, I can just upload the text file from my hard drive – rather than redoing it.

When uploading to the server you can either upload all your affiliate pages into a folder on the server or upload it into the root directory. If you upload it to a folder then you can make that folder no-follow in your robots file. If you upload it to root directory, you should then when adding a link to that file on your page, should make sure sure it is a no-follow link.

By uploading to a folder you add no-follow at just one place – in your robots.txt file. By uploading to root, you have to add the no-follow tag every time you add a link to that file.

Why, then would some one add it to their root – Because some web site owners like the look of a link when it is straight from the root rather than from the folder – For example: www.ImBizJourney.com/hop/hostmonster.html versus www.ImBizJourney.com/hostmonster.html.

You can do it either way – folder or no folder – just make sure you cloak your links and don’t leave them exposed. There is only one place that I don’t cloak links and that is when adding amazon links – I should soon get into the habit of cloaking my amazon links as well.

Best,