Make Money Online - The CaymanHost

25/01: More On Cloaking and Tracking Your Affiliate Links

Much has been said about the importance of securing affiliate links and there are various ways of going about it.

Although popular opinion agrees that it is, without doubt essential to disguise affiliate links if you want to maximize your conversion rates, there there are conflicting ideas about the best way to do it.

I'm going to give you what is in my opinion, the best way I have found to achieve secure affiliate links and show you, by way of demonstration, how it works in relation to various cloaking options. I'm going to look at just three options, and show you the benefits and pitfalls of each, using a popular affiliate program offering cheap caribbean vacations.

1) PHP redirects - the most obvious benefit of this method is that it's free and easy to use. Here's how it works:-

Our raw affiliate link looks like this: 

http://www.tkqlhce.com/click-2392857-10426292

It's pretty obvious and pretty ugly, and by using a php redirect we can turn it into something like this -

http://www.thecaymanhost.com/caribbean-vacations2/

This is simple to do. Create a new directory on your server, called whatever you like - in this case we have created a folder called "caribbean-vacations2". Then, create a file within that directory called "index.php" and use the following code

<?php header('Location: http://www.tkqlhce.com/click-2392857-10426292'); ?>

There is no need for all those spaces between php and header - just one will do but my blog engine seems to want to put in those spaces!! 

As you can see, we've used the original affiliate link in the code, and you would change this to your own link of course. Click on both links and you will see that they both now take you to the same place. However - and this is a big however - you will notice that once you get to the web page in question, the address bar in the browser will still show an ugly long affiliate link. So, PHP redirect works - but only up to a point!

2) Free cloaking services are plentiful and some are better than others. I'm going to illustrate with a new free service called ViralLinkTracker.com which is free and offers some pretty cool features.

Here is the cloaked link generated - quickly and easily from the members area -

http://www.virallinktracker.com/vlt/links/7570

The important thing to note here is the address bar in your browser - it still shows the link that your visitor clicked on. The program also offers a secure cookie option and the ability to promote the cloaking program itself if you so wish. On the face of it, as a free solution it's pretty good and definitely one of the best free services released in quite a while. However, it can't be ignored that the link still looks like an obviously cloaked affiliate link. Many savvy surfers will know this, and maybe go back to the website after clearing their cookies and just buy through their own affiliate link or just to ensure that they don't buy through an affiliate link at all!

3) Here is my solution of choice - an encrypted redirect which for this example looks like this -

http://www.thecaymanhost.com/caribbean-vacations/

Looks like the PHP option right? Yes, it does, but now, when you click on the link, you will see the important difference in the address bar - it shows the link exactly as clicked. I'm not a techie, but I achieve this using the excellent Web Army Knife program. This software is not free, but contains a collection of great marketing tools and I think it's worth the price for this encrypted cloaking tool alone.

I should also add, that even viewing the source code of the page won't do a snooper any good - try it and see for yourself. I've tried other cloakers in the past, but this one is still the best by far. If that changes anytime I'll update you here on the blog.

Whatever option you choose, there is really no excuse for leaving your affiliate links as naked as the day they were born any longer. If you do you are inviting the loss of commissions on a daily basis.

TCH

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