An Easy Way to Keep More Commission ~ Cloak Your Affiliate Links
Cloaking your affiliate links is a great way to keep more of your affiliate commissions. I know I have written a post about this before, but I recently learned a new trick to [tag-ice]cloak your affiliate links[/tag-ice] and wanted to share it with you.
This tip is for people who have hosting and have an unlimited number of subdomains available to them. If you don’t have this please take a look at Url Freeze, it’s a great free service to cloak your affiliate links.
Now, the first step in the process is to get your affiliate link, whether it’s from clickbank, paydot.com, or anyplace. Let’s take a look at my Url Freeze link for an example. Here’s my affiliate link: http://www.urlfreeze.com/jackieads
That is a pretty obvious affiliate link and as internet surfers become more educated they are less apt to click on an affiliate link, so here’s what I’m going to do instead.
I am going to go to my cpanel at my hosting company. Once I’m in my cpanel, I’m going to click on “subdomain”. I then see a couple blanks to fill in. I have to choose which domain I want a subdomain on, and for this example I’m choosing my internet marketing domain. Once I choose internetmarketingformommies I see a space in front that needs to be filled in. I am going to choose a word or phrase that is indicative of the site I am cloaking. So for url freeze I am choosing ~ cloaking-links. Once that space is filled in just click add. That creates your subdomain. It takes a couple seconds for it to work.
The third and last step is redirecting your new subdomain to your merchant page. Now ~ my hosting says my subdomain has been created and offers me the option to “go back”. Choose that, it will take you back to the page you were on. Directly under the space I just filled in to create my subdomain is an option to “setup redirect”. Choose the subdomain that you want to redirect from the drop down list. Once you’ve chosen the correct subdomain click setup redirect. You will now see a space to add the merchant url. Put your affiliate link in the box and hit save.
That’s all there is too it. Now instead of an obvious affiliate link my link to url freeze is: http://link-cloaking.internetmarketingformommies.com Pretty cool huh?
I have found this method makes it much easier for me to keep track of my affiliate ids as well. I am forever forgetting the link and have to go back and recreate the hoplink. Now all of your subdomains are listed right in your cpanel for easy access. 
Have fun and good luck, let me know how it works out for you.
[tags]cloak affiliate link, cloaking affiliate url, url freeze, subdomain redirect, cloak affiliate id [/tags]
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Excellent post! It is great info for the new marketer! Many people do not realize they can mask and cloak their affiliate links!
Cloaking is essential for any affiliate marketer! Too many bad guys out there (I found this out the hard way!) Another free service that I like to use cloaking my links is OffTo.net. Not only can you cloak your lin ks for free, by doin it you are advertising your links there for free as well! definitely worth checking out! Great post!
DO you think that using other cloakers like URL freeze are safe? Also, I was using a service like this and it seems that it doesn’t always work and in fact, it redirected to the proper website, but I wasn’t credited with any sales!
Did you make sure your link was working before you did it? Did you follow the link through and make sure you were showing up as the affiliate?
Personally I like to use subdomains to redirect my affiliate links.
But I think like with anything you have to make sure you are using a reputable service. Url freeze works quite well.
Jackie
Follow me @momtohanna on Twitter!
this just caught my eye today. I was noticing over time that Mike Filsaime just uses subdomains. I wondered how he had so many domains but then noticed the sub.review somethingorother.us. very clever, clean. I wonder if you can use it for PPC or if you need a content page to land on first and then a masked link to the affiliate page.
Jackie,
I must be missing a step. I created the subdomains and redirected them toward my affiliate links. However, when I follow the links, they still take me to pages that show my affiliate links. Do I still need to use link cloaking to show the main product site instead of my affiliate coded site? I tried clicking on your Url Freeze link, but it took me to a page that didn’t have info about Url Freeze.
Thanks,
April
April´s last blog ..The Benefits of Using Binaural Beats
not sure what the problem is. None of my subdomain links show the aff link when you get there. hmm… Unless you’re working in the IM niche it’s not going to be that big of a deal. Most people (outside of IM) don’t understand anything about that and wouldn’t have an account to go get their own links.
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