How to Hide Your Affiliate Links
Why hide?
Some people believes that affiliate links have to be visible, to be honest that this link is actually makes some financial income to site owner. Others are sure that showing affiliate links equal to loosing money because lots of people do not want to join under you. Marketing work should be rewarded. Why not? Here are some advantages of hiding your affiliate links:
- Bypassing the link. Because some private reasons, lots of us would remove affiliate ID from the link and go directly to merchant’s website to get the products he/she wants (I did !!!) . So only merchant makes money, and this is really bad thing. Why? Site owner has paid domain, hosting fee, … to run his site. Why we do not do him a favour by click-though his referral links ?
- Visual look. Hidden link is much more beautiful and shorter (for example, http://your-site.com/url) than affiliate link (for example, http://merchant.com/product.php?affiliateID=ThemeLib).
How to hide
Here are 2 easy techniques you can use to hide your affiliate links :
Online services
Their are lots of website services which can create a new url to hide your referral link. Simply go to these websites and submit your affiliate link to get a short one.
Some of them are :
Advantages :
- Easy to use, take about 10 seconds to get thing done
Disadvantage :
- Not meaningful to the product you refer, for example, the link http://tinyurl.com/5emvv3 will redirect you to http://revolutiontheme.com
- Can not manage your links
Hint :
- Some services allow us to customize the url will be created. You should choose a meaningful name, but I think beautiful urls will run out soon.
.htaccess 301 redirect
Create a .htaccess file if you do not have one then add this code to the file.
Redirect 301 /product http://merchant.com/product.php?affiliateID=ThemeLib
Advantages :
- Manage your links easily
- Meaningful links, for example, http://your-site.com/revolution will redirect you to http://revolutiontheme.com
Disadvantage :
- More complicated
- Must own a domain
Hint :
- You should use links with ‘go’ or ‘redirect’ to inform user that this link will redirect to another site, for example, http://your-site.com/go/revolution is better than http://your-site.com/revolution
Although there are another techniques can be used such as PHP script, HTML code, Javascript, … but I found two methods above are the best. They’re easy to use for most Blogger and WordPress users.
If you know another easy techniques, please let me know by post a comment on this post. Thank you.
Twitter
Hey, I dunno about your readers, but fore me personally:
What the heck are affiliate links anyway?
Care to have a post on what they are and how they work? I’m sure noobs like me would appreciate this.
Here is a sample for that
http://www.solostream.com/2007/11/30/solostream-affiliate-program-launches/
Thanks for the link. I understand better now. Maybe one of these days, you can do a review on the effectiveness and trustworthiness of these affiliate links.
Hey,
I don’t see the download link for the Arthemia Blogger theme that you converted. Is it released yet? If not, when do you plan on releasing it?
Thanks for sharing! You can do redirect easily with your cpanel.
thanks.. but somehow the short url don’t usually work.. anyhow.. thanks for the tips..
new information for me. thanks
Bingung,nech…..success fr u!
I would prefer Javascript ..coz its easy to install and call wherever we want link to hide.
So is the Arthemia Blogger theme coming out anytime soon?
Sometimes is better to keep the affiliate links without the redirection
Especially in the make money online niche
People know if you trying to hide an affiliate link in your post on such a blog and is fair to keep the link without hiding it
Services that I know being used by some affiliate marketers:
1. TinyURL.com
2. URLFreeze.com
3. TwistUrl.com
4. redirectmagic.com
5. shorturl.com
6. yournewurl.com
They work by replacing the long affiliate link with a short tinyurl.com/12345, or urlfreeze.com/12345 accordingly.
Whilst efficient at first glance, you have to keep in mind the following:
• By going to their website it is possible to trace the url and expose the affiliate link, hence defying the purpose of hiding. People who are aware of this are usually those who have been involved in Internet Marketing at some point.
• To the novice, those links can be a potential deterrent, since it has nothing to do with the provided product. And of course, it doesn’t serve your branding goals.
So, when using this we are scaring off the novice, and aren’t doing anything to protect against the savvy. Therefore I wouldn’t recommend using those.
You can also check out the following :
http://www.addme.com/linkcloaker.htm
Vineet Aggarwal
http://www.ILoveExtraCash.com
Thanks for your information. They are very useful
Thanks for sharing…I hadn’t known earlier that we could expose those links,although I have tried myself…Seems I have to learn a lot in affiliate marketing..
good sites and we all know it but if you use your own site to redirect the affiliates links , this will be great and better than using this sites , i don’t say it is bad but i like to use my pages in redirect .
I’ll go to hide links =)
There are ways that are similar to any posts you, only the difference .. the link has changed short .. can we promote through Twitter. Visit try this address: http://tweetburner.com/
Regard
I just signed up for my first affiliate account after reading this, they are actually going to call me to make sure Im not a bot! lol
Sounds like you just applied for Pepperjam or Marketing Leverage.
Can .htaccess 301 redirect be done with a custom domain name hosted on blogger?
i like the way i make a page and put the redirect html inside it , so when someone click the page link it load him to my affiliate page .
Since my sites and pages are built on PHP, I use the php method with the “go” sub folder as you pointed out in post. It helps me to keep track of stats as well by giving channels to each subfolder.
Thank you so much for these useful URLS
.
Hi, I use Blogger.com and I was wondering if anyone knew of a way to hide affiliate links.
Is there any way to hide the affiliate links from third party website ? I guess, no.
Thank you so much for these useful URLS
i use blogger, but don’t know how to make that htaccess file. can u give step by step on how to do it?