Cloak your affiliate link to make more money

Here’s a question - If I did a review on the hypothetical affiliate site called “site.com”, and had a link that pointed to http://www.site.com/refer.php?id=XZ89FNOWND909; asking you to signup on that site, what are the chances of you actually clicking it?

My findings have shown me that people are often hesitant to click on affiliate links as such due to two reasons.

1. It looks really weird with the id numbers and so on.
2. People actually figure out it’s an affiliate link and directly go to the site because they just don’t want others earning a buck online.

Affiliate marketing is a million dollar industry and most of the time, affiliates tend to lose a lot of money because of their users not going through their affiliate link. And this is where cloaking comes in. And I’m not going to lie, I, along with most of the other bloggers in our niche, do cloak affiliate links. And that’s how we keep paying out bills.

What is URL Cloaking?

With simple URL Cloaking, you can turn - http://www.123AffiliateSite.com/refer.php?id=XZ89FNOWND909; into a user friendly link like - http://www.mySite.com/affiliatesite., thus removing the weirdness of the URL and concealing the fact that it’s an affiliate link.

So how do you do this? Well, it’s really easy. The easy method (PHP include) and the real easy method (tinyurl.com)

The easy method - PHP include

All you have to do is create a PHP file and upload it to your server.

• Just open notepad or any text editor and type:

<?php include("http://www.site.com/refer.php?id=XZ89FNOWND909"); ?>

• Make sure you replace what’s within the double quotes (” “) with your affiliate link.
• Save the file in any name you want (probably a user friendly name) with the .php extension
• Upload it to your server

And there you have it! If you saved the uploaded the file myFile.php into your server, addressed yourdomain.com, then when people click on a link such as http://www.yourdoamin.com/myFile.php, they will be seamlessly re-directed to your affiliate link, which you put inside the double quotes.

The real easy method - tinyurl.com

It’s too easy. Just paste your affiliate links on the home page of tinyurl, and they will shorten it to something like http://tinyurl.com/123; which, when clicked, will re-direct the people to your original affiliate link.

This comes in handy for blogspot and wordpress.org bloggers especially since to the best of my knowledge, blogspot and wordpress.org doesn’t let you upload PHP files.

Is it ethical?

Well, let me put it this way. I don’t see why it’s unethical. I refer someone to a product or a service, which I think is worth the investment. And in return, the company gives me something. It’s a WIN/WIN situation. Concealing your affiliate link is not hiding what you do. It’s making the best return out of what you offer.

If someone doesn’t click on mine or any other Internet marketer’s affiliate link, just so that we won’t make a few bucks, would that be ethical? Over to you.