Affiliate marketing has become extremely blatant online. Thus, as an affiliate marketer it is becoming increasingly important to watch your back and keep tabs on your competition. One important step in safeguarding your affiliate earnings is cloaking your affiliate urls. As some might know, not doing so can mean a huge dent in your revenue.
You Can’t Tell a Teenager from an Affiliate Marketer
In this day and age, most people know at least a thing or two about what affiliate marketing is and how it works. While not a good thing, it is definitely something we can deal with. You see, most people know what an affiliate link looks like. It’s got the name of the website for the product/service you are promoting and somewhere in there your affiliate id. So, what’s stopping someone from substituting it or removing it altogether? Nothing.
Your Fate Should Not Lie In The Hands of A Third Party
Would you trust a stranger to manage your bank account? Probably not, but that’s what you’re doing when you use a free url redirection service to cloak your affiliate ids. Why? Well, the redirection service could choose to inject their affiliate id into your url and thus steal your commissions. We don’t want that, do we now?
Doing It The Right Way
If you’re serious about cloaking your affiliate links, you need to utilize your hosting account. First login to your site using FTP and create a new directory. Title it as you wish, just remember that it will be part of the new url we will be linking to. Ideal titles are “out” or “go.” Once you’re done, go into your new folder and create another directory. Title it according to which affiliate you wish to redirect. In that folder, you want to place a .htaccess file. To create the .htaccess file, you will need to use notepad. Enter the following line of code into the file:
Redirect /out/affiliate_offer_name http://youraffiliateurl.com/affiliateid
Replace out with the name of the first directory you created, and replace affiliate_offer_name with the name of the second directory. Then replace the youraffiliateurl.com with your original affiliate id. Save and upload the file to your server. If you cannot name it .htacces, name it something.htaccess and upload to your server. You can then remove the “something”.
Rinse and Repeat
You should cloak all of your affiliate links, not just one. Once you’ve finished cloaking your first link, repeat the process until you have cloaked all of them. You can then sit back knowing that nobody is putting their hands into your pockets.
Image: A. Rendle
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