Cloaking your affiliate links is a good way to keep people from stealing your commissions. All a “cloak” has to be is some sort of a redirect.

One of the ways that I was ‘taught’ how to create a redirect a while back was to use a .php  file and upload to your server. That way when your customers clicked on the URL, their browser would redirect to the sales page that you are promoting.

Don’t get me wrong, I still use this method for a number of the affiliate products that I promote and they still do work. The problem that I found was that for each new affiliate product that I was promoting, whether it be here, or in the emails I send to my subscribers, I had to upload a brand new ‘file’ to my webhost.

That is until I discovered a much easier way to do this. It’s a very easy way to manage as many redirects as you want, and it’s FREE and easy to manage with just a single file.

Let me give you an example. My good freind, and one of my mentors, Doug Champigny, has just released a new PLR package in a smoking hot niche. You can pick up his Aromatherapy PLR Package and have the rights to do just about anything with it. You will need to read the license agreement to find out what you can’t do, but that’s pretty standard with a package like this. The Aromatherapy PLR Package includes a 50 page eBook in .doc & .pdf formats, 10 Aromatherapy Articles, mp3 audio versions of all 10 articles, TWO sets of website graphics, PLUS the .jpg AND .psd graphics for everything! After all of that, you won’t believe the price. I told Doug that he needed to go see his therapist with the price that he is offering this package at.

You will notice that when you ‘hover’ over the link, it looks like you are going to go to a page on my site (http://www.ron-barrett.com/AromaTherapyPLR.html), but you aren’t.

You will be ‘redirected’ to Doug’s site. This is something that ALL affiliate marketers should be doing, but a majority don’t. Why? I am not sure. Maybe it’s because they think it’s a bit too complex to create the file and upload it to their site.

Well, I am here today to show you how easy this really is. The person I learned this from claims that it is so easy, even a five year old could do it. It is now my preferred method of creating redirects.

There are a couple of problems with linking directly to an affiliate page with your ID. The obvious reason is that someone could steal your commissions if they are also a member of the same affiliate program (which is common if it is a large program like Clickbank).

The other main reason is that a lot of people are wary of clicking on long affiliate links, things with lots of letters and numbers. This seems to be more and more the case as I sometimes see these mile-long links, with un-needed crap in them like “id=xxxx”, “www.yourwebsite.com/cgi-bin/affil-id=xxxx” etc. A good affiliate link should have two items MAXIMUM. If the program is specifically towards one URL it should only have one piece of information, your affiliate name (preferably a name instead of a number). But that’s not always within your control.

The most common thing I see a lot of affiliates doing is just creating the folder or the file and doing a simple redirect. So if that person needed the URL: http://www.yourwebsite.com/theaffiliateprogram

… To send the user to:

http://www.affiliateprogram.com/?affiliate-id

They’d physically make the folder on their site and add in an index.php redirect. Sometimes they’ll also use .html redirect, which uses meta tags… which means the .html file has to actually load before the redirect takes place. That makes the trip take even LONGER and in the meantime the visitor is staring at a blank page.

This would be ok, but what if you were promoting 20 or 30 or 40 affiliate programs? That’s a lot of folders to get the coding exactly right and to upload each and every time you add another program.

Anyway, now that I have given you reason to change the method you use to redirect with, my NEW preferred method is with an .htaccess file. All I have to do when I want to add or remove a redirect is just edit a text file, and upload it to the webserver.

Redirect /clickbank http://hop.clickbank.net/?xxxxx
Redirect /paydotcom.html http://paydotcom.com/?xxxxx/jumpx
Redirect /AromaTherapyPLR.php http://www.dougchampignysaromatherapysite.com
Redirect /dotcrap http://www.thisisanexample.com

(In this example, you would change the “xxxxx” above to your own Clickbank name.)

You put each redirect on a different line. What you first need is the word “Redirect”, and then the relative path the .htaccss file is going to intercept. In the first line since my second part of it is “/clickbank”, that means if my domain is:

http://www.mydomain.com

… And someone goes to:

http://www.mydomain.com/clickbank

… It will send the user to that third item on that line, the long Clickbank hoplink.

The redirect doesn’t just have to be a folder name. You could even make people think you’re linking straight to an HTML file, like in the second example. Or, it could even end with “.php” if you want (3rd line) or even something you make up, like “dot-crap” (last example).

So go ahead and add tons of affiliate redirects in seconds. Just modify that above code to your needs, save it as “htaccess.txt”, upload, change file permissions to 755, and rename to “.htaccess” with that dot in front.

The file will disappear to you, because it becomes hidden, but if you need to come back to that list later you can still see it with many FTP programs. I use FileZilla and I go to Server -> Force Showing Hidden Files. I don’t know how it’ll be in your FTP client… in a lot of them this sort of choice doesn’t even exist. But that will allow you to see the .htaccess file for future editing if you lose the copy on your hard drive. (Hey, stuff happens.)

One last thing you should notice is that even though .htaccess has sort of a “bare bones” feel to it, it doesn’t have to be hard to read. Look at what I’ve done, I’ve spaced everything up so when I look at the file in Notepad with my fixed-width font everything lines up nicely.

If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment and I will get back with you as soon as I can. YES, I do monitor comments.

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