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?