Affiliate Marketing For Dummies » hide affiliate links

Hide Affiliate Links On Any Web Page Quickly and Easily

Neil — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 15:11:26 +0000

Hi all,

If you are just putting your ugly looking affiliate links on your pages then I can guarantee that you are losing commissions! Some people will either chop off your affiliate ID or replace it with theirs.

Here’s a quick and easy way to hide affiliate links on any web page. This method will not only work on your own sites, but will also work on Squidoo, Weebly etc where they would normally strip any code that you may use to hide your links using other methods. (NOTE oesn’t work on Hubpages)

Just paste the following code into your page, you just need to change your affiliate link:-

Now as you can see the above code is what you would use to insert an image into your webpage, but instead of a link to an image you have your affiliate URL, so whenever someone loads your page it drops the affiliate cookie on their computer, the code is completely invisible to the visitor.

You can add this code anywhere on a page, the advantage is that you can just have your merchant link visable such as http://www.some-merchant-link.com and people won’t know that you are getting a commission if they click on the link and make a purchase.

Neil

Hiding Affiliate Links With A Redirect Script

Neil — Sun, 25 May 2008 15:13:16 +0000

Here’s another way to hide affiliate links, this is just a simple redirect script.

If you aren’t hiding your links then you could be losing out on sales and clickthroughs, the less your links look like affiliate url’s the more chance you have at making a sale, it also stops people from chopping off your tracking ID’s.

Simply upload a file to your server containing the following script, just add your affiliate URL where needed:-



Your Page Title



Loading
http://www.YourAffiliateURL">Page>...

For more link cloaking techniques, please see the post How To Hide Affiliate Links

IMPORTANT: Some link cloaking techniques may prevent some sites from dropping tracking cookies into your visitors computer which means you may not get credit for that referral. Check all links to make sure they work correctly, if you are still unsure use something like Affiliate Cloner to be on the safe side.

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How to Hide Affiliate Links – Additional Information

Neil — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 19:31:23 +0000

A few days ago I posted an article on How to Hide Affiliate Links but there was something very important I should have mentioned.

You must check that the links work and that they are still tracking your affiliate id’s before you start doing any kind of promotion. This is important guy’s!!

You must test your links, all the way through to the payment page, for example, if you use the zero-frame code I suggested, which frames the affiliate site you are promoting, this works great on clickbank etc, however, if it is used for promoting some sites that use just the paypal payment, i.e the site has just put in the payment code that paypal provide, then you might find that the payment page won’t load! Yikes!

If this does happen, just cloak your links using .htaccess or whatever is a suitable alternative to your needs.

On the subject of framing affiliate sites, some companies do not allow this, most do, but some don’t, please check their terms before diving in.

That’s all for now, just make sure you check your links!

Neil

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How to Hide Affiliate Links

Neil — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 12:49:23 +0000

It is sometimes necessary to hide, or cloak, your affiliate links to stop people stealing your commission or bypassing the affiliate link and going straight to the main site.

Some people will also replace your affiliate link with their own so that they receive the commission, this is know as link hijacking.

The other advantages to hiding affiliate links are that if people see your link in a post or email, they just won’t click it just because of the affiliate connection, hiding links WILL increase your CTR (Click Through Ratio), also, as I mentioned in an earlier post ( see How To Get Top Search Engine Rankings With Article Marketing ) many/most article directories won’t accept articles that contain affiliate links.

Please note: Some article directories such as ezinearticles.com will not even allow redirects or cloaked links, in this instance you will need to send people to your own website page, free blog or lens, that has your offer on that includes your affiliate links. This is another good reason to have your own domain (see Cheap affiliate web hosting companies ).

The quickest way to hide your links is to use a company like tinyurl.com which is free to use and turns links like http://www.YourUglyAffiliateLink.com/?12345 into something like this http://tinyurl.com/35q7rl, however this is only really a quick fix and is better to be used for mailing your opt-in lists, the people who trust you, people who don’t know you can’t tell where that link is going to take them, it could be a porn site for all they know, you will get better click through rates using another method.

Link redirection using a php script

If you have your own website you can hide your links by setting up a page redirect.

All you have to do is to just insert this one line of code into a php file:-

You can name your php file to anything you want, for example, great-bargains.php, so your actual link would be YourWebsite/great-bargains.php which will redirect to the site you are promoting.

Hide your affiliate links using a zero-frame code

This technique has a little more code than above, but it actually frames the site you are promoting.

Again, you will need your own website to use this technique but it’s just as easy to do.

The following code frames the site you are promoting making it look 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);

How to hide your affiliate links on a web page

This script is works a little differently to the above, it actually hides your affiliate link or any other link, from a person who hovers over over a link on your actual web page.

For example, if you hover over http://www.mygiveawaysecret.com you will see http://www.mygiveawaysecret.com in the bottom lefthand side of your browser status bar.

But, if you use this little piece of extra code that I’m about to show you, you can actually fool people that they are going to the site displayed on your actual page and in their browser status bar, but take them to a totally different website!

Here is the cloaking code in action, hover over the following link and look at your browser status bar at the bottom left, everything will look normal, then click on the link and see where it takes you, don’t worry, it only takes you to another site of mine.

Here’s the link with the added code:-
forfreedom.ws

Please note: There is a similar link cloaking code like the one I’m going to give you available, however it doesn’t work in IE7, the following code does;-

Anchor Text

How to hide affiliate links using htaccess

This is another very simple redirection technique by adding a line of code to your htaccess file.

redirect 301 /AnyNameYouLike http://YourAffiliateUrl

Just add the above line of code to your htaccess file, the /AnyNameYouLike is the directory or page you want to use for redirection, for example, if named it /dog-food your link would look like this http://www.yourdomain/dog-food which would redirect traffic to your affiliate link.

You don’t need to create any pages or directories using this technique, just add the redirection code to your htaccess file.

OK, there you have it, several ways to mask your affiliate links, these methods can increase your CTR and commissions, no more ugly affiliate links, by the way, it is a major pain in the butt trying to add code to a Wordpress blog, there must be a plugin somewhere to make life easier. :-) .

Neil

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