There are a lot of ways to cloak your affiliate IDs. Why would you want to do that? So people don’t put their Clickbank ID in place of yours and get the commission after finding the product from your website. This cheats you out of your rightful commission. Another reason is to keep people from knowing the link is an affiliate link. Some people don’t know how affiliate programs work and don’t trust those long, weird looking links. Or they may think the product will somehow cost them more if you get a commission.

This is the way I do it:

Log into your hosting account with your FTP program. I like to use Filezilla.  If you would like to try Filezilla, make sure you download the Client version. NOT the server version. Go to the main folder of your website and find the file named .htaccess

Download the file to your computer and make a backup copy of it. If there is already something in the file, don’t mess with it. Leave it where it is and start a few lines below it.

You’ll just want to do a 301 redirect for each affiliate product you want to cloak.

Example using a linux host:

Redirect 301          /Product                                http://1.affiliateclicks.com/u/somestuff/t.asp?id=45646
Redirect 301          /More-Info/Best-Email-Blaster           http://1.affiliateclicks.com/u/txvets/t.asp?id=BLA

Save the file and upload it back to your web folder on the server.

Now just link to www.thenameofyourwebsite.com/Product to go to the first affiliate product .

Link to www.thenameofyourwebsite.com/More-Info/Best-Email-Blaster to go to the second product.

You can add as many redirects as you want.

When the visitor hovers over the link, it’ll look like this:

www.thenameofyourwebsite.com/More-Info/Best-Email-Blaster

Instead of this:

http://1.affiliateclicks.com/u/txvets/t.asp?id=BLA

Which would you feel better about clicking on?

There is really only one space between the three parts of each line. I just made it more so you could see it better. Of course, replace thenameofyourwebsite with your real website URL. Sorry, had to say it :) Also, the affiliate links used in the example aren’t valid links. I just made those up for the demonstration.

This should be enough info for you to cloak your links. If you really want to know all the ins and outs of redirects, just Google “301 redirect” and go nuts.

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