Masking Affiliate Links
January 5th, 2009 | 
Author: I launched yet another affiliate marketing site today based around the guitar niche. Instead of making a Squidoo lens and pushing traffic with articles, I opted to try something new. I installed Joomla onto the domain and stripped it down as far as I could to make it look like a real sales page. It actually looks really good! Followed up with some PPC ads on Google. I’ll see how it pans out and post some results. I plan on seeing what else I can do with this Joomla sales page business…
My tip today is on masking affiliate links. If you don’t know what masking affiliate links means, it involves hiding your affiliate link so that visitors aren’t wary of clicking on it. For example, which looks better?
a)strommy.product.hop.clickbank.net/
b)www.myproductsite.com/goto/product.php
The answer is “b”. This is because the link appears to be internal and have no marketing affiliation. It’s not very hard to believe that people wouldn’t click a link simply because it’s an affiliate link.
So how do you mask your affiliate links? My favorite way of masking links is to create a folder named “goto” somewhere on my server and putting PHP redirect files for every link I have. In other words, after you’ve created a folder named “goto”, assuming the example above, you would create a file called “product.php”. In this file place the following code:
<?
header(”location: strommy.product.hop.clickbank.net/”);
?>
Using the above example, everytime someone clicks my link “www.myproductsite.com/goto/product.php” they will be redirected to “strommy.product.hop.clickbank.net/”. Some say that PHP redirects are a bad idea if you plan on using Pay Per Click advertising but I’m not sure if it’s true or not. What is your favorite way of masking affiliate links?
Posted in 
Tags: 
I think that masking affiliate links is a must. You are correct that they look better but it helps from getting your links “hi-jacked”. Creating an actual PHP tool works well, but I use a wordpress plugin. You can find a free one called WP Affiliate Links at the wordpress.org site.
Thanks for the tip! Here’s a link to the plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-affiliate/
Great information. Most would not think about masking them, but in this field as any other you need to do whatever possible to protect information from being taken. Who would think Twitter and Facebook accounts was something people would want to gain access too.