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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