Masking Your Affiliate Links

When you sign up as an affiliate for a company, you are provided with a very unique link that contains your specific affiliate ID embedded within it.

Many people simply use this ID as it sits within the content of their website or blog. The problem is, that as much as we want to believe everyone will do the right thing, there are some unscrupulous individuals out there who will try and “hijack” our affiliate links or bypass them all together.

If you’re curious as to how someone would hijack your affiliate link, let me give you an example. Let’s say that you’re an affiliate with ClickBank and you’ve chosen your affiliate ID to be “555bluesky” for example.

When you decide to promote a product through ClickBank, your ID will look something like this:

555bluesky.companyyourpromoting.hop.clickbank.net

Now, when you add this to your web pages or on your blog, those savvy enough to recognize an affiliate ID will see that you are recommending a product and that your affiliate ID is 555bluesky.

The way that someone would hijack your affiliate ID would be to simply put THEIR affiliate ID in place of yours. So let’s say that their ID is “highjacker88″…all they need to do is type in the address bar:

highjacker88.companyyourpromoting.hop.clickbank.net

and thus take your affiliate link therefore not earning you any money.

What you need to do is to hide that affiliate link and I’m going to show you how with PHP code.

Now don’t get all bleary-eyed on me, it’s actually very, very easy.

The first thing you’ll need to be certain of before using PHP code is that your website is hosting on a Linux server…again, I know, very technical terms but again, this is something that sounds a lot harder than it is…typically when you sign up with a hosting company, they’ll ask if you want a “Windows” based server or a “Linux” based server and if you chose a Linux based server, you’re good to go.

I personally prefer PHP code because it is what’s called “server-side” code which means that if someone were to view the source code of your webpage, they would not be able to see the secret code that I’m going to show you here. With a straight HTML page, they can, thus resulting in potentially stolen affiliate IDs.

Here’s how you would hide your affiliate ID using PHP code…you’ll need to work in the code view of your web page in order to do this…here’s what I mean…

Click here to view an image (will open in a new window)

There are two things that I want to point out from the image above, the first is that you’ll notice there is no tags either above or below the special PHP code within the page. You don’t need them…in order to hide your affiliate link using PHP, all you need to do is replace your affiliate link within the code on your page as it’s displayed within the image.

The only thing you need to concern yourself with is the everything from line 1 to line 4 where you simply have a question mark “?” and a “>”.  This ends the PHP code - on line 4 within the image this is where the PHP code stops - you don’t need to use anything beyond that closing “>”.

Then simply save the page as a .php document and make it something easy for you to remember. Something like affiliatelinkone.php. Now all you need to do is point visitors to your website or blog to affiliatelinkone.php and it will automatically redirect the user to your affiliate page.

FORGET THE CODE I JUST WANT SOMETHING THAT WORKS!

If you have no desire to write the code yourself or you aren’t working on a Linux server where the above code WILL work, then I suggest using a company such as www.TinyURL.com. You simply take your affiliate ID link and it will create a completely different link that will also redirect to your affiliate page.