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