Under The Shadows: How To Cloak Your Affiliate Links
Joining an affiliate program is one way to make money online
. By posting advertisements of your affiliates on your sites, you can allow web visitors to earn you money by clicking on the links and giving you commissions. That is, you can get paid for every click on a certain link, or a percent of every purchase made at your parent site. All you need to do is get a set of links, place them on your site, and wait for your visitors to come up and click them.
Each link is actually long, and fashioned to not only lead your visitors to an interesting advertised site, but to report to the affiliate program that someone has accessed a site because of you. It is due to this reporting that you are paid per click. It is also due to this precision of link composition that affiliate links are stolen.
It is reported that most members of affiliate programs lose about forty percent of the affiliate commission that they deserve simply because their affiliate links are stolen by greedy webmasters. This is especially true of popular affiliate programs and likewise popular affiliate links: with all the clicks they are bound to generate, such links can be a tempting target for many webmasters that are not eager to join an affiliate program, but want to earn easy money anyway.
Cloaking Your Affiliate Links is An Alternative
Many webmasters are now more careful, and are finding ways to cloak their affiliate links, or using redirected links in order to keep their commissions. Not only does this keep greedy webmasters at bay, it also keeps members of affiliate programs from getting annoyed because of the characteristic long links associated with their affiliates.
These long links, moreover, will usually show up as such on web pages. Long links can be ugly to look at, and can drive web visitors away. Long links, moreover, can distract web visitors, or can make a website appear amateur, cluttered, and even low budget and part of the spam gang. If you are a member of an affiliate program, think twice before pasting the affiliate link onto your web page: remember, you need to make the link look useful. You should not make it look like an affiliate link, which will in turn make web visitors think that you are desperately making money off their clicking habits.
The key to replacing these clumsy affiliate links is to either employ URL cloaking methods, or brief, redirects on the side of your server, so that visitors can easily grasp what the links are for. There are various ways to do this, and you should use techniques that you are familiar with before re-engineering your web content.
Redirecting and Cloaking Can Keep You Safe
In the directory redirect, you will need to make a new index file in a specific location of your server. First, connect to the server of your site, then create a directory with a name that is easy to remember. Create an index file with the redirect code in it, then save it to this directory. A variant of this technique is the sub-domain redirect. This time, you can create a sub-domain, and from there, set up the index file to facilitate redirection. This can work if your web host allows you to set up more than one sub-domain for your account.
If you do not want to touch your existing directory online, then you can tweak your website by placing redirect scripts in it. There are many free scripts available online that will allow you to protect your affiliate links, as well as to redirect them. These scripts are usually placed at the beginning of your sites text file.
If your knowledge of web design and engineering is well advanced, you can manipulate the .htaccess file, which is available on the server of your website. You will need to create a new directory, and then save a file there called .htaccess, which you can create using your computers text editing software. The .htaccess file will contain a redirect command script, along with the directory to which you want the affiliate link to be redirected, and the complete URL of the site to which you want a request to be sent.
These are only a few methods that you can employ when designing your website and cloaking your affiliate links. In addition to these codes, you can also download or purchase online software that can do the cloaking and redirecting for you. There are also companies online that offer cloaking services for members of affiliate programs.
Cloaking or redirecting links will not only serve to protect your income, but allow you to earn more as well. A professional-looking, cleanly-placed link can make your website appear less cluttered, and more dignified. This can actually encourage your clients and web visitors to trust you. With a little more patience and creativity, you can see your affiliate program earning you the money that you want and need.
by: Elijah Chai
Ezines as an Affiliate Revenue Generator How To Become A Super Affiliate How To Become A Super Affiliate 2 How To Choose The Perfect Affiliate Program Don't Even Suppose About Affiliate Promoting Till You've got Browse This - Half one five Essential Things You Should Find In A Winning Affiliate Program! How To Manage And Run An Effective Affiliate Program Free Affiliate Program from Cleaners' Hub Choosing A Affiliate Program Here's How To Avoid The 3 Most Common Affiliate Mistakes Here's Why Using Camtasia Can Increase Your Affiliate Checks Some Advice For Those Who Want To Become Affiliates Top 3 Ways To Boost Your Affiliate Commissions Overnight