Hi .. I was wondering if anyone has experience with affiliate link cloaking programs.. and ofcourse what these experiences are .. Maybe someone can also tell me wich link cloakers are good ... And is it really necessary to use these programs ? Thanks in advance.. Gdev
Aren't those just redirecting scripts? I always use one; I think it makes for a smoother user experience if they see http://www.yoursite.com/getinfo.php?item=itemname rather than http://www.shareasale.com/etcetc
I found this post but i still have problems understanding this. Is any hosting package equiped with the possibility to install a htaccess file? I used godaddy.com before and it didn't work when installed the file in the root? I called them and guess what they told me? I'm sorry sir...you can use google to find out how to install this! I can't help you with that.
You don't need to make it that complicated. Your hosting will support some time of scripting language (most likely PHP) so all you have to do is create a page such as TheHoff described which contains a script that redirects to the affiliate link. I use ASP and it's a simple one line statement: <% response.redirect "http://www.affilitelink...." %> I don't know PHP, but would image it is just as simple.
I thought cloaking was using to steel other webmasters commissions. Well I guess I am wrong then. The best thing to do is to using php or another programming language to do it. Doing it this way is free.
John... You've got it the other way around.... Affiliate link cloaking is in order PROTECT webmaster from getting their comissions stolen. Thiefs are sometimes able to just copy paste their own ID in to the affiliate link and then they will earn the comission that someone else worked hard for . For this there are software programs wich will 'cloak' the link into an 'unrecognisable' link so that those thiefs will not be able to cheat you out of your money... The question is still ... is anyone using them and what their experiences are with them ... Gdev
gdev I am all ears on this aswell! I will try to find out on some forums, if I heard about it I will pm you and reply here. Could you please do thesame to me?
There is a program out there that costs $97 to do that, I lost the url as I figured there would be a free program out there to do it but couldn't find one.
Don't pay to cloak your links - you can do it with a .htaccess file free and easy. I've tried to explain it simply at http://www.affiliatetip.com/affiliate_tip_30.php
As Shawn said, it's very easy to cloak affiliate links in your .htaccess file. You can make it appear as though your linking to a directory located in your site (when it actual fact your redirecting to your affiliate link). Also if for some reason the affiliate link changes, you only have to make the one change in your htaccess file.
All great points, dcristo - I've tested having the redirects as directories and file names - never saw a big difference. But there have been many times that I've had affiliate programs close, perform poorly or change their terms to something I didn't like. With the .htaccess file, it's so easy to make a global change in those cases. For instance, I've promoted a number of domain registrars over the years. The redirect for all of them has been the file name, domain.htm - the file name never changes, but the destination is always changing to test things.
Using .htaccess is good, but can you actually populate it using mysql and php. If not then using .htaccess would be rather slow when maintaining your links for searching for broken links, links that you want to delete, links that you want to ad, etc. Wouldn't something like: "http://yourdomain.com/affiliateprograms.php?site=50" work as nobody can see the link and it just then redirects to the real site. Wouldn't something like that work? By the way the site=50 is the affiliate programs id that you have given it in the database.
Personally, I don't know how to do it with mysql or php. I guess .htaccess is sort of link cloaking for dummies.
That is the way I do it. Rather than key off that is an affiliate link with "affiliateprogram.php" you might use a more tame filename like "info.php" or "viewitem.php"
Yeah, I don't use affiliateprogram.php either. It is just what I thought I would give as an example. I thought that doing it this way would be much easier than using .htaccess if you already have your affiliate programs listed in a mysql database and you use php to access them.
You could double protect your link using a javascript (which would be disabled if the browser doesn't support javascript) and the .htaccess trick. The javascript can be kinda useless but sometimes does the job.