How To Cloak Affiliate Links Instantly
August 30, 2007
Naked Affiliate Links Are Bad
Ever feel like your affiliate links are a little naked? Mine sure do sometimes, with lines and lines of dynamic code Google and your readers know that your links are in the buff. Time we covered ‘em up nicely shall we?
Cloaking your affiliate links is a fairly easy task to do if you know how. There’s multiple methods of going about it, but none warrant buying expensive cloaking software when there are scripts that will let you do the same for free. Today I’m going to demonstrate a surprisingly simple way to cloak your affiliate links, that does not involve any coding in PHP or MySQL.
Affiliate Links and Visitor Behaviour
I get peeved whenever someone is trying to sell me something. I know there’s nothing wrong about pitching a product, but I am intrinsically motivated to shrug of the offending advertiser and refrain from buying into the product or service being offered. As an affiliate marketer this is hugely detrimental to your prime source of revenue, and so you must go about building the element of trust.
Aside from a well thought out landing page, visitors are much more likely to click through and convert on your call to action when they believe they are being directed by an unbiased source. This user confidence or trust is broken when they see a link with a dynamic url leading them to the referrer site.
For example, what would you rather click? www.tla.com/?ref=249moolah *or* www.tla.com ?
The Cloaking Code
<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/targeturl” target=”_top” onmouseover=”window.status=’http://www.displaythisname.com’;return true;” onmouseout=”window.status=’ ‘;return true;”>Your Site</a>
<img src=”http://www.yoursite.com/1.gif” width=”1″ height=”1″ border=”0″/>
Simply code your links in the fashion described above to cloak your preferred affiliate link. If you are willing to make the effort however, it is best to code your links through a PHP or HTML redirect and ensure that you disable indexing of these files by search engines. This can be achieved by disabling search engine robots from accessing the folder you place your redirects in.
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Posted in Sneaky Tactics, Tutorials
A Toronto Based Serial Entrepreneur and Internet Marketer
August 30th, 2007 at 8:20 pm
I would think it’s better to do a redirect rather than cloaking the link to something like “http://tinyurl.com/example2″. The click through rate for a redirect link should be somewhere better in my opinion.
August 30th, 2007 at 10:24 pm
I think that it would depend on the niche you are trying to target. For example, webmasters and bloggers already have a very good idea of what’s behind a tinyurl code, versus a link cloaked to lead to the main page of a website.
–Dev