Hi. I need some help and would really appreciate if anyone could help me out here. First of all, do you think its necessary to mask your links so visitors dont see the affiliate links itselves? Also, do you no follow all your outgoing links? And more importantly, how do i do this? I have no clue how to do this and could really need some step by step newbie guide. Thanks so much in advance.
The simplest way to cloak your links would be to use a URL shortening service such as www.goo.gl or www.tinyurl.com. There are basic scripts to do it on your end, so instead of linking to tinyurl.com or goo.gl, you could link to something like www.yourdomain.com/?link=loseweight. It's not NECESSARY, but it is highly recommended to cloak. Whenever I click a link, I glance at where it's taking me, so it's best to hide it (if it's an affiliate link). No-follow isn't necessary. People use it to prevent spam from things like comments, posts, or anywhere else a user can submit their own content onto your web page. If you want to make a link no-follow, add rel="nofollow" to your anchor tag (ex: <a href="google.com" rel="nofollow">no follow link to google</a>).
It depends.. Most likely, visitors wun click if they see an affiliate link, it's good to mask with URL shortening services.
I usually "hide" all my affiliate links inside my domain, I never use tinyurl and the other services. That's because they will eventually show the url in the end, with your affiliate id. If you hide it within your own domain, that won't happen. I am using Ninja Affiliate (a wordpress plugin). I am not sure if I will lose any sales if I would go for the long url, but all the super affiliates are doing it, and I thought there's probably a reason for this It looks a lot better, and to me, it's a more professional way to do it. And I like to track the clicks, and check out where the traffic is coming from. I never think about the no-follow or do-follow question when it comes to my affiliate links.