How to easily cloak your Clickbank and other affiliate links for free
May 2nd, 2008 | By Barbara | Category: Make Money, Niche Marketing, Profit Tools ReviewsOne of the best
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ways to make money online is from affiliate programs.
That’s a given.
But an opportunity (remember, there are no such things as problems, there’s merely opportunities to embrace!) now arises. Take Clickbank, for example – their affiliate links look something like:
http://AFF.VENDOR.hop.clickbank.net
ie,
Now, if I was an unscrupulous individual who had my own Clickbank account, I could easily substitute in my OWN clickbank ID and grab the commission myself.
Not good.
At all.
Wouldn’t you agree?
I thought so! 
So instead of putting out affiliate links to make money that are easily stolen, I choose to cloak my links.
It’s easy to do! Here’s how.
1.) Have your own domain Part 1?
If you have your own domain, you can use your control panel to set up a subdomain like so:
This link goes to my affiliate link for Niche Rockets. You simply have to configure your subdomain to automatically redirect to your affiliate link. Need help for that? Here’ s the instructions for Cpanel.
2.) Have your own domain Part II?
You can set up a directory entitled “help” or “learnmore” or “recommends” etc and then put in autoforwarding files. For example, let’s say that you want to promote The Way of the Rich Hermit. You could create a file that contains:
<title>Rich Hermit</title>
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”>
<head>
<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”/css/smart.css” type=”text/css”>
<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0; URL=http://www.richhermit.com/click.php?p=1&a=lingstar“>
</head>
See that bolded “lingstar”? That’s one of my affiliate IDs. When people visit the page
They are automatically sent to the proper page…with the affiliate information cloaked.
You can download the rh.html file here. Simply save it to your computer, change the affiliate ID to yours, and upload it to your site.
Nice, eh?
3.) Want to use a Wordpress Plugin?
There are also plugins you can use to cloak your links within Wordpress like so:
As you can see, cloaking your money-making affiliate links on your blog is very easy to do indeed. And given how most customers want to save as much money as they can, cloaking your affiliate links will neatly side-step people stealing your hard-earned commissions. Most definitely…it’s a winwin.
Enjoy!
Barbara
#BEGIN highlights of this blog writing post:
Beginners blogging tips: You should cloak your affiliate links.
Intermediate and/or Advanced blogging tips: Set up subdomains to simplify the process.
#END highlights of this blog writing post
Like this post? Please feel free to Digg It – I very much appreciate your time!
ps – speaking about Clickbank:
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[...] had written an article about how to prevent this over at How to easily cloak your Clickbank and other affiliate links for free. So I dashed off an email to the blogger that pointed out the problem at hand as well as the [...]
make money online…
It also got me to wondering what it is that people get from these things. Do people really draw motivation from this stuff? I have been reading Darren Brown’ s Tricks of the Mind , or at least re- reading sections of it, this week. He points out that…
Thanks, I found this information all over the place, it’s great but it’s all the same. Have a domain, do this or do that, or do both. Have a WP blog and add those sextensions. But so far nobody talked about using it in Blogger. I’m on google search page 10 and nothing, nada. Now if you’d find a solution for THAT problem, I bet people would spend money on it, as it’s really hot. Not everybody wants to migrate from blogger to WP just to cloak their links *sigh*
[...] and CLOAK your links! It’s a very easy simple thing to do – I wrote about that over at How to easily cloak your Clickbank and other affiliate links for free. You can even go one step further and simply dash up a cute little php script on your [...]
i just signed up with Clickbank and i am very new to affiliate marketing. i just hope that i would earn on this program