Hiding Your Affiliate Links

More bloggers are using affiliate marketing to make money online than we have ever seen in the past.  Which is why I get asked so often, how I hide my affiliate links.

Not everyone believes in hiding affiliate links, but there are too many disadvantages if you decide against it.  Some that you may be unaware of yourself.

The Advantages Of Hiding Affiliate Links

There are some great advantages for hiding affiliate links.  For both SEO and maximum payout.

1. The Virus Scare – As internet users are becoming more aware that they shouldn’t click on links that look strange to them, because of scams and potential virus threats, they are also refusing to click affiliate links because they look exactly like these strange scam links.  Which link looks more like something you’d be prepared to click? “www.affiliateoffer.com/?pid=%$234%917” or “www.steven-sanders.com/freebook.html“
2. Commission Theft – Many affiliate marketers that might be interested in purchasing something you provide an affiliate link for may manually change the link to match their own affiliate link.  This is done so they can get the commission from your hard work.  Not only is this done manually, but many automated scripts are now being written that will do this.  If you hide your affiliate links, it is impossible for these automated scripts to steal your commissions.
3. Search Engine Optimization – You can modify your links with keywords rather than the long strange looking characters.  And because the links are hidden through redirection from a static html or php page that has noindex on it, search engines shouldn’t look at it.

How to Hide Your Affiliate Links

There are three methods to hiding your affiliate links, but we’re only focusing on two here.  The third is an unnecessary and difficult method.  The following two should be all that anyone ever needs:

Automated Plugins:

Alot of bloggers, like John Chow and Tyler Cruz, use the WordPress Link Cloak plugin.  With this plugin, you simply enter your affiliate link url, the modified url you would like displayed, and a specific keyword.  Then everytime you write a blog post that contains the specified keyword, it automatically creates your hidden affiliate link.  This cuts back on alot of work, so you can focus more on your blog content rather than worrying about monetizing your posts individually.

Manual Method:

Some bloggers that try to use the automated plugin, find that their theme is laden with errors that don’t fully support the plugin.  But not to worry, there is a manual way, that isn’t as easy to do, but it gets the job done.

To create the hidden affiliate link manually, simply create a new PHP file, and add the following to it:

<?php
//rename the file with a .php extention after putting your affiliate url below

$url=”http://www.affiliateurlhere.com/affiliateid”;
header(‘Location: ‘ . $url);
?>

Replace the url with your affiliate url.  Then save the file as whatever url you want the reader to see.  For example, if I created an affiliate link for a great ebook, I would save the file as “ebook.php“, then I would upload it to my server and everytime I wanted that url in my blog post, I would type the url path to “ebook.php“.

Now everytime someone click that link, they would get redirected to your affiliate url.

What are your thoughts on hiding affiliate links?