As an affiliate marketer, your responsibility is not just to promote your affiliate link, but to also protect your affiliate sales. Although there is no 100% guarantee, but doing reasonable house keeping on your affiliate link would minimize the lost of potential commission, especially when you have put in the time, and probably money in your marketing effort.
One common way most marketers undertake to protect their affiliate sales is by cloaking their affiliate link, which is basically to create an alternate link that redirects the visitors to their affiliate site.
Three main reasons why you should cloak your affiliate links:
- To prevent affiliate theft, where your affiliate id got replaced and you missed out on a good commission, especially with ClickBank or Internet Marketing related products
- To have a “friendlier” link to present in your marketing materials that doesn’t shouts “Woo hoo! I’m going to make some commission!”, or confuse the visitors with a link that doesn’t make sense
- To control the destination of the link such as going through your opt-in page to capture visitors’ details before being led to your affiliate page
There are few ways to cloak your affiliate links. You can do it via your webhost’s Cpanel, by directly updating the “.htaccess” file in your web sever, or using third party scripts / services.
Suppose you want to promote my CashBlog X report that pays out 100% commission, and you want to protect you affiliate link, you can cloak you link via your Cpanel in just 3 simple steps as follow.
Step 1: Login to your Cpanel with your username and password
Step 2: Click on the “Redirects” link / icon
Step 3: Fill in the blank and click “Add” button
This method may not work correctly if your affiliate link contains “&” e.g. www.domain.com/?rid=1023&c=test. Thus, always ensure your redirect link works correctly before you market it.
So, how do you go around this problem to make sure your redirect link always leads to the correct site?
Well, you can modify the “.htaccess” file directly in your web server under the “/public_html” folder to achieve the same results. Want to know how to do it? Just post a comment and I’ll create a simple tutorial on this.
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Thanks for the easy tip.
For PawPersuasion.com, we are on an older host and have no cPanel. I am having to learn html to use the css / php set-up the guys in NY did.
For new sites, though, I will only use one with a cPanel - like HostGator. The example above makes the redirect appear so simple with a cPanel!
Questions:
(1) How do you put Google Analytics or other tracking into the redirect page if you use the easy approach above? Any way to insert the Google code between the tags?
(2) How do you modify the ht.access file for each of a series of redirects, AND how do you track the click-throughs?
Thanks for your help!
Hi Margaret,
Thanks for the questions. Here are your answers:
1) This approach is easy because you do not need to create an additional webpage for the redirect. Thus, you have no where to place your tracking code. If you wish to do so, you can use third party tracking script such as Adtrackz (Note: this link is also tracked using Adtrackz) to track clickthru. Else, you’ll have to create a webpage with just the following HTML code (replace “<_ " with "<"):
<_html>
<_head>
<_meta HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH" content="0; url=http://www.youraffiliatelink.com">
<_ /head>
<_body>
Place your tracking code here
<_ /body>
<_ /html>
2) Setting the redirect in CPanel actually updates the .htaccess file in your /public_html folder, just that sometimes it may not store your destination link properly as mentioned in my post, thus modifying the .htaccess file directly gives you more control.
How to modify your .htaccess? I will create a simple tutorial for it soon. Keep a lookout for my new posts.
With regards to tracking clickthru, my answer is the same as 1) 8).
Hope this helps.
“Well, you can modify the “.htaccess” file directly in your web server under the “/public_html” folder to achieve the same results.”
Yes Vern i would like to know how to do this.
Thanks
Ian McConnell
I Make Money While I Sleep!