If you are new to Affiliate Marketing you might not know about Link Cloaking or you may want to know how to do it.
There are several ways that I tested, I will give my personal view on each one.
1) tinyurl or offto.net cloaking websites.
When I didn’t know better I used offto.net to cloak my affiliate links, you simply put your hop link (http://affiliateID.publisherID.hop.clickbank.net) and the name of your link and they give you a url like http://offto.net/forexbrotherhood which looks better you will agree. tinyurl and other examples are the same.
The issue with these is that offto.net could change the link or go out of business or have server downtime all of which is out of your control.
2) Subdomain redirect
My host 1and1 allows me 100 subdomains on my current package. A sub-domain has the format http://subdomain.domain.com and I created subdomains such as http://forexfunnel.forexrobotreviews.com and then used the 1and1 control panel to redirect this subdomain to my hop link.
I personally like the look of this, but recently I have had some issues where my affiliate id is not showing up on the payment page, so I have stopped doing this.
3) php redirect
This is the way I am now cloaking my hop links (I don’t cloak all of my hop links at the moment, only ones that might be changed by the purchaser, ie other Affiliates.) You will need a website, hosting and a html/php editor for this, but it really does seem to work the best and most affiliate marketers use it.
You need to create a webpage such as forexfunnel.php and using the editor (I use Dreamweaver) and with no other text, html or php code add the following:
<?php
$url=”http://google.com”; // enter the url here
header(“Location: $url”);
?>
You replace the google.com with your hop link. You then need to upload the page to your website and use the link such as http://automatedforex.co.uk/forexfunnel.php
This looks professional and works just fine.
I am told you can use the following html meta tag instead if you don’t like php, but don’t be afraid of php like I was. It really is much easier than it looks.
<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0;url=http://google.com/”/>
I hope this is useful to some of you starting out.
James
Popularity: 27% [?]
James, redirect works great but how do you cloak the “hop=xxxxx” to prevent commission theft when it is still displayed at the landing page? e.g. I click on your “Commission Blueprint” link and see the “hop=you” so I change the link to my hop, purchase the product, and cut you out of the loop. Now, if I were paying for ‘clicks’ it costs me the click if someone does that to me and I’m out the commission. I know that there are not any dishonest buyers or affiliates that would ever think of doing such a terrible thing but, I’d like to be safe! Can you help?
RC
RC
Not much you can do about that my friend. IF another affiliate wants to buy the product, more than likely they will buy with their hoplink. That doesn’t matter if the hop=xxxxx is shown or not. The last person to serve a cookie gets the commission, plain and simple.
Try to avoid buying traffic that is likely to be affiliates, that should help avoid this scenario.
Good Luck.
James
I’d like to suggest a service which combines both methods (php and html) to generate short and cloaked referral links: http://gotourl.ws
Using html redirect allows you to strip ‘referer’ header which usually stays unchanged when php redirect is used.
Interesting post my friend. Would be great to get a definitive answer on this one as there seems to be a lot of methods out there to choose from! Sam.
Looks like subdomains and redirects won’t work with a PPC campaign then. Only look good on a website or for your email list. bummer.