Link Cloak­ing And Af­fil­i­ate Link Redi­rect­ing (Part 2)

From Willie Craw­ford.

In part-1 of this ar­ti­cle we looked at why link cloak­ing or redi­rect­ing your af­fil­i­ate links is ab­solutely essential.

If you missed that ar­ti­cle, you’ll find it at: https://WillieCrawford.com/RedirectingAndCloaking/

Now let’s look at spe­cific meth­ods of cloak­ing or redi­rect­ing links.

Link short­en­ing ser­vices such as TinyURL.com can be used to make long, ugly af­fil­i­ate links more palat­able. I use these on sites such as Twit­ter, and to shorten LONG URL’s on my blog. I gen­er­ally don’t use them in emails any­more be­cause I’ve been told that some IS­P’s have black­listed some of these ser­vices. Since mostly mar­keters use some of these ser­vices, that would make sense…

htac­cess redi­rect - This in­volves cre­at­ing and up­load­ing an .htac­cess file to your server. It’s sim­ple and easy, but also in­tim­i­dat­ing to some, so I won’t ex­plain it here. Your web host prob­a­bly has a tu­to­r­ial on how to do this if you’re re­ally curious.

Your .htac­cess file can af­fect many as­pects of the way that your web­site per­forms, so un­less you want to take the time to re­ally un­der­stand it, you should prob­a­bly not use this method. Do it wrong and you could sud­denly find your­self un­able to ac­cess cer­tain files on your server!

HTML redi­rects - I use these a lot. I cre­ate an .html file with redi­rect html com­mands em­bed­ded in the „header” sec­tion of the html page. That file is then up­loaded to your server, and when the url is ac­cessed, the vis­i­tor is au­to­mat­i­cally redi­rected to your af­fil­i­ate link.

Down­load a sam­ple file and com­plete in­struc­tions on how to set up an html redi­rect here: https://WillieCrawford.com/HtmlRedirect.zip

PHP redi­rects - I also use these a lot and have found them faster than .html redi­rect in many cases. I cre­ate a .php file with redi­rect html com­mands em­bed­ded in the „header” sec­tion of the file. That file is then up­loaded to your server, and when the url is ac­cessed, the vis­i­tor is au­to­mat­i­cally redi­rected to your tar­get link.

Down­load a sam­ple file and com­plete in­struc­tions on how to set up a .php redi­rect here: https://WillieCrawford.com/PhpRedirect.zip

Link cloak­ing Soft­ware. My fa­vorite is Af­fil­i­ate Cloner. It al­lows you to cre­ate links that will set an af­fil­i­ate track­ing cookie, and then send your vis­i­tor to any spec­i­fied page.

One rea­son that you might want to do this is that you’re pro­mot­ing a great prod­uct with a hor­ri­ble sales page. So, you can write and host your own sales page, and cre­ate an or­der link on that page that sets the cookie and then links di­rectly to the or­der form.

You may also write such great emails, that they do a great job of sell­ing. If your cus­tomers are al­ready sold, you may not want to then send them to a long sales let­ter which might „un­sell them.” In­stead, you can send those ready-to-buy cus­tomers di­rectly to the or­der form.

Af­fil­i­ate Cloner does this beau­ti­fully, and you grab a copy at https://WillieCrawford.com/AffiliateCloner/

There are also tons of scripts out there that you in­stall on your do­main, and then redi­rect the af­fil­i­ate links through your do­main. Those are suit­able for many pur­poses, and ac­tu­ally al­low you to log-in and CHANGE what prod­uct a par­tic­u­lar link pro­motes - with just a few clicks of a mouse. This means that if you later change your mind about a spe­cific prod­uct, and are pro­mot­ing it in thou­sands of places, with just a few clicks of your mouse, you can send that traf­fic to an al­ter­na­tive product.

Some af­fil­i­ate mar­keters love these scripts, but I don’t cur­rently use one. In the in­ter­net mar­ket­ing niche, I think that the most pop­u­lar ones also sig­nal that you’re pro­mot­ing an af­fil­i­ate prod­uct, and lower your re­sponse rates. That’s just my opin­ion though.

I’ve just given you nu­mer­ous ways to redi­rect or cloak your af­fil­i­ate links start­ing to­day. If you are not do­ing this, you ARE los­ing sales! ------------------

Willie Craw­ford is a web­site traf­fic gen­er­a­tion ex­pert. He of­ten dis­trib­utes con­tent (ar­ti­cles, videos, pod­casts, and press re­leases) to gen­er­ate highly tar­geted web­site traf­fic. To do that ef­fi­ciently he uses the au­to­mated sub­mis­sion ser­vice at: https://ibmm.com/epbt

To help you suc­ceed Willie has cre­ated The In­ter­net Mar­ket­ing In­ner Cir­cle, a mem­ber­ship site where he fre­quently brain­storms so­lu­tions to prob­lems such as those dis­cussed in this ar­ti­cle. Join that dis­cus­sion for your suc­cess at TheIn­ter­net­Mar­ketingIn­ner­cir­cle.