Hi, I totally understand affiliate marketing, however, every time I try to dive into it, I get trapped. Where? In creating cloaks so that I am not giving away my affiliate ID. I recently started my own website and making informative posts, while mentioning products that I have used. I wanted to link them to my affiliate account but everytime I do this I seem to get a 404 error page. I have tried first going through my host at host gator and creating a redirect...Im still uncertain of this process...but I tried, and it ended with a 404 error. I then tried to use Pretty Links plugin, but still, I get a 404 error page. Any advice on how to get my affiliate links clean so they can read as a normal URL and not an affiliate URL? PLEASE HELP. I would love to set up more affiliate links once I can get this down.
There are a few popular products out there that will do this for you with other features too, like http://prettylinks.com or http://eclipsecloaker.com
You don't need to cloak your links, the bug is somewhere in your website editor. Open a new thread somewhere in the webmaster section and ask a webmaster to help you correcting the bug - or just use the weebly website editor; here you can post how many affiliate link do you want, in the most easiest way - you have the add link option just like in any forum (you can add what anchor text do you want and what affiliate link do you want)! Anyway this is the most easiest website editor, even a child can use it, and both the domain transfer and the hosting are free, with unlimited bandwith (for 2 websites - if you want more sites, you need to upgrade for $4.75/month)
try to use acceptable cloaking site like bitly.com or etc but tinyurl is banned so check before using this kind of site.
You can always roll your own cloaker. It's fairly easy with a database and PHP. Store the URL you want to cloak in the database, return a number for the URL (auto increment in the DB works well) then have a page on your site that takes the number, looks it up in the database and converts it to the cloaked URL. This way you keep everything on your site and under your control and you have no problem with certain link cloakers being disallowed on some sites.