Redirecting Links With .HTACCESS

As mentioned in my previous post “3 Simple Steps To Protect Your Affiliate Sales”, creating a redirect to your affiliate link in Cpanel is not 100% guaranteed to work, and since the Cpanel updates the .htaccess file under the “/public_html” directory in your web host, why not update it directly yourself? In this case, it gives you more control and accuracy.

One advantage I want to point out about using redirect, is having to skip creating additional folder and webpage, for example, if you wish to create customized link:

http://www.vernlai.com/recommends/cashblog

that redirects to your affiliate site e.g.

http://www.CashBlogX.com/?e=youremail.com

you can either:

1. Create a index.htm file that contains the redirecting code, and store it under the public_html/recommends/cashblog directory
2. Create or modify existing .htaccess file in your public_html directory by adding the following line of code:

“Redirect /recommends/cashblog http://www.CashBlogX.com”

Obviously, the latter is much easier to do. And this is how you can do it in 3 simple steps, but before that, I assume you know how to upload/download files using FTP programs, and that .htaccess file already exist in your /public_html folder.

Step 1: Download the .htaccess file from your webhost under the /public_html directory to your PC

Step 2: Open the file with your favourite text editor, append the following code into it and save the file. Of course, you can use whatever source and destination links in this case.

Step 3: Upload the file back to your webhost under the /public_html directory and overwrite the existing file.

Now, thats it! What you need to do now is to test the link to see if it redirects to the correct destination.

Although, redirecting or rather cloaking your affiliate link this way is easy, the cons to this is that you have no way of tracking the clickthrough. To get to the middle ground of having both flexibility, ease of management and also tracking of clickthrough, you can check out Link-ISH, the links central management software. To give it a try, you can download the Lite version in our Free Stuffs page under software section.

Click here to download Link-ISH Pro edition (Full features enabled)

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