Affiliate link cloaking is nothing more than hiding (cloaking) your affiliate links and one of the smartest things you will do as an affiliate is to start cloaking your affiliate links today. Why? There are two reasons! The first is that research shows that visitors are less likely to click affiliate links or links that look like affiliate links. The second reason is that affiliate link cloaking helps keeps thieves and dishonest affiliates from stealing your commission.

So you know what affiliate link cloaking is and what the benefits are, but how do you cloak an affiliate link? Well there are several ways to do this. Some are paid and a some are free. While most of the paid versions are honest, I have heard of affiliate links getting rewritten and people losing commission while using affiliate link cloaking software or scripts. I prefer to use the free way below, because I can be sure that no one is trying to overwrite my affiliate links and it is free.

Now on to the best method (at least to me). The first thing you want to do is create a directory (folder) on your hosting account and give it a name. What i do is name the directory after the product or service I am promoting. Example a directory named hostgator would mean that I am promoting hostgator hosting.

Once you have your directory created, you would then want to create a simple php redirect (below) using notepad and add your affiliate link to the redirect. Once you have added the affiliate link, save your new redirect as index.php and upload it to your new directory. Example -  my affiliate link for hostgator would go into my new directory called hostgator. Now instead of some ugly affiliate link that scares away visitors, my new link will look like affiliatesblog.net/hostgator and my affiliate code is hidden from prying eyes.

<?php
header( ‘Location: http://youraffiliatelink.com’ ) ;
?>

While affiliate link cloaking does add a couple of minutes to your task, you are protecting your money and the hassle is well worthit. Feel free to copy the code above and save it as index.php and just remember to update the affiliate code each time you use it. To keep things uniform accross your site, I recommend using this on all outgoing links (affiliate or not), this way there is no difference in appearance of your outgoing links.

Be good!

Matt