How to Hide Your Affiliate Links and Increase Your Click Thru Rate

As an affiliate marketer, it is sometimes necessary to hide, or cloak, your affiliate links to stop other affiliates from stealing your commission or bypassing the affiliate link altogether and going straight to the offer page.
Some affiliates will also replace your affiliate link with their own so that they receive the commission. The most common name for this is link hijacking. Another reason you would want to hide your affiliate links is a lot of times if people see your link in a pos or email, they won’t click it just because of the affiliate connection. Hiding your links WILL increase your Click Through Rate.
Note: There are article directories out there, like ezinearticles.com, that won’t allow redirects or cloaked links, When you come across a site like this you will need to send people to your own page, that has your offer and includes your affiliate links. That is why it is always good to own your own domains.

1. Use a URL Shortener: The quickest way to hide your links is to use a company like bit.ly which is free to use and turns links like http://www.YourSuperLongAffiliateLink.com/?98765 into something like this “bit.ly.com/85h7d”. It’s important to note though, that this is only a quick fix and should be used more for mailing your opt-in lists, and to the the people who trust you.

2. Use a php script: If you have your own website, one way you can cloak your links is by setting up a page redirect. All you need to do is to just enter this one line of code into your php file

You can name your php file to anything you want, for example, my-offer.php, so your actual link would be YourWebsite/my-offer.php which will redirect to the site you are promoting.
3. Use a zero-frame code: This technique takes a little more coding knowledge then the php script, but it actually frames the site you are promoting. Again, you must your own website to implement this technique but it’s still fairly simple to do. The code below will frame the site you are promoting which will make it appear to the visitor as if they are still on your site. In other words, no matter which page they go to on the framed site, they will only see your domain in the browser window.

Product Title

document.removeEventListener(‘click, clickHandler, true);

4. Use HTaccess: Here is another simple redirection technique you can implement just by adding a line of code to your htaccess file.
redirect 301 /WhateverNameYouChoosehttp://MyAffiliateUrl
Just add the above line of code to your htaccess file, the /WhateverNameYouChoos is the directory or page you want to use for redirection, for example, if named it /race-car your link would look like this http://www.yourdomain/race-car which would redirect traffic to your affiliate link. You don’t have to create any pages or directories, just make sure you add the redirection code to your htaccess file.

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