Link cloaking made easy

If you are an affiliate marketer then you will surely need to learn about link cloaking. Link cloaking also some time called link masking is to make your affiliate links for something it is not.

For instance for those that use Clickbank will understand that the classic Clickbank link is in the format http://AFFILIATE.VENDOR.hop.clickbank.net

Link cloaking will make it appear in the form: http://www.blogmarketingtools.com/xxxx

Most of the time people are afraid of affiliate products thinking that it is only being promoted because of money. Thanks to link cloaking it will be a bit more difficult for them to discern the deception.

How to do it?

htaccess file

• Open your htaccess file
• Edit it and add the following line of code

redirect 301 /xxxx http://YourAffiliateUrl

xxxx is the link that you will be inserting in your site. For instance on this site we will be using http://www.blogmarketingtools.com/xxxx

Visitors will be thinking of going to another directory of the blogmarketingtools.com instead of being led to an affiliate page.

Wordpress plugin

This is done through the use of a Wordpress plugin.

• Upload the plugin to your Wordpress site
• Activate it
• Update permalinks so that your htaccess file can be rewritten

Once installed you will have the choice of choosing which links to cloak and also the prefix of the URL. For instance you can choose to use http://www.blogmarketingtools.cpm/goto/xxxx

Redirection service

Service such as tinyurl will allow you to shorten and cloak your url from something like http://www.blogmarketingtools.com/how-to-implement-google-analytics-in-wordpress-blogs/ to http://tinyurl.com/na7fcf

People will be more confident to click on such a link instead.