3 Ways to Protect or Hide Your Affiliate Links
These few months, I had been looking into Affiliate Marketing, and would like to start promoting in a very short time. For those who do not know what Affiliate Marketing is, I would like to explain it in a very brief method. Affiliate Marketing is “selling other people’s product online, and earn commissions on successful sales. The percentage of earnings are totally based on how much the product owner wants to share with the marketer”.
However, I had came accross one major problem which pops into my head. I am wandering, what if I successfully get visitors to my website to see the product, and find out that it is an affiliate product, say an ebook from clickbank, there are possibilities on savvy marketers will take my product, change the product ID into their own clickbank IDs, and take away my commission. So, I decided to find some other ways to overcome this major problem.
Below are 3 of the ways to protect or hide your affiliate link: -
Method 1: Create a page and simply redirect your visitors to your affiliate product
From my research, this method is very reasonable to me, and I will be using this method the most. The procedure to use is shown below. However, this method need some basic html code understanding:
i) First, create a sub domain from your main domain page. For instance, your main domain is http://www.yourdomain.com, and you are going to promote shower cream, therefore you may create a sub domain named http://www.showercream.yourdomain.com. (yourdomain is key in the actual website domain name that you purchased)
ii) Create a simple redirect page on http://www.showercream.yourdomain.com using the redirect script below: –
<html>
<head>
<title>Text Link Ads</title>
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”>
<script>window.location=”http://www.youraffiliatelinkhere.com“;</script>
<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”1; url=http://www.youraffiliatelinkhere.com“>
</head>
<body>
<p align=”center”>You are being taken to the correct page.
<br>If the page does load after 5 seconds,
<a href=”http://www.youraffiliatelinkhere.com“>click here</a>.</p>
</body>
</html>
In this script, youraffiliatelinkhere shall be replace with your actual Affiliate Link. This simple script will redirect your visitors to your affiliate link website automatically, once they landed on your http://www.showercream.yourdomain.com.
iii) Lastly, in your main page http://www.yourdomain.com, you need to link your visitors to click on http://www.showercream.yourdomain.com. Then you are being protected from directly expose your affiliate link to your visitors.
Method 2: Hide your Affiliate Link in your main website using HTML method
Normally, when you want to link a group of text to another webpage the HTML code to do that is similar or same as below:
<a href=”http://www.yournextwebpage.com”>click here</a>
In this case, your webpage visitors will see the “click here” wording in blue colour, when hover their mouse pointer to it, they will see “http://www.yournextwebpage.com” appears at the bottom left of their web browsers. Most of the time, when yournextwebpage appears as an affiliate link, this will direct expose to visitors your affiliate ID and it is on risk of being hijeck by internet savy. Therefore, instead of using the link above, it is advised to use the below HTML code: -
<a href=”http://www.yournextwebpage.com” onMouseOver= “window.status=’your text here!’; return true” onMouseOut=”window.status=”; return true”>Click here</a>
This code will hide your affiliate link by any text that you want, by changing ‘your text here!’ to your desired name. When visitors hover their mouse over the link, the text that you typed in will appear on the bottom left of their browser, instead of directly expose your affiliate link.
If this explaination is confusing you, you can easily use this webpage to accomplish the same method that discussed here. This webpage is called HTML Basix, which you just need to key in your affiliate link and your desired name to show when mouse pointer is hover over the word, then click ‘generate’ button, and you will have your HTML code ready to be used.
Method 3: Use Online Free Converter to Hide Affiliate Link
There are a few free link converter software available online. The most commonly used program is called TinyURL, or PinURL. These two websites are free to use, but currently PinURL is under construction, maybe you can revisit this webpage next time. Basically, the usage for both of these websites are similar, after the conversion, instead of having a very long affiliate link address http://www.showercream.com/?12345, it will shortern it to http://tinyurl.com/trqzeyy. The most important, is to prevent directly expose your affiliate link to your visitors.
There are a lot more methods out there to protect or hide your affiliate links, however the method that I discussed above will just prevent your affiliate link being exposed directly to your visitors. But bear in mind that, there are thousands of method out there to protect or hide your affiliate links, if savy marketers want to get your affiliate link, they will still find ways to do so. The protect or hiding process will only slow down their process.
