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Increase Your Affiliate Signup Rate: Hide Your Affiliate Links
written by Hans
March 7th, 2008Welcome to Catchtheposts! I hope that the content of this blog will be helpful to you. Don't hesitate to use the contact form to send me your comments, feedback, suggested topics or questions. Thanks for visiting!
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There are several ways of making money online. One of them is by joining affiliate programs. Independently of the program you choose, this one will provide you an affiliate link. The goal behind this link is to properly identify its owner. This is required to credit the product sales to the right person. Obviously, as an affiliate marketer, your goal is to motivate people to follow your link; this will allow you to convert your visitors into sales. However, the reality is that most people won’t be tempted to click on such a link. Why? I guess this is because it looks a little scary. Here is an example of an affiliate link:
http://www.affiliateprogram.com?ref=id
The good news is that there are many ways to transform that kind of link into something more conventional! You may, however, read carefully the TOS of each affiliate program you joined because some may strictly forbid to hide your affiliate link.
The HTML Redirect Method
This method is one of the simplest methods. Here are the steps to follow:
1. Create your affiliate root folder.
For example: ../redirect/
2. Create a subfolder for each of your affiliate.
For example: ../redirect/Affiliate1/
3. Create a file named index.htm that include the following HTML code:
<HTML><HEAD><TITLE>Title page</TITLE>
<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0; url=http://www.affiliateprogram.com?ref=id”>
</HEAD><BODY>
You are being redirect to the correct page!
</BODY></HTML>
4. Customize the file by changing the title and the affiliate link.
5. Place the index.htm file into its corresponding affiliate subfolder.
Then when you are linking to ../redirect/Affiliate1/ you are linking to your affiliate link. This is as simple as that.
The PHP Method
If you have PHP installed on your server, you may use the following method. This is the easiest way to hide your affiliate link with PHP. There are several other techniques possible, but this one do the job very easily:
1. Create your affiliate root folder.
For example: ../redirect/
2. Create a subfolder for each of your affiliate.
For example: ../redirect/Affiliate1/
3. Create a file named index.php that include the following PHP code:
<?php
header(”Location: http://www.affiliateprogram.com?ref=id ”);
?>
4. Customize the file by changing the affiliate link.
5. Place the index.php file into its corresponding affiliate subfolder.
Now, just as the HTML Redirect method linking to ../redirect/Affiliate1/ is the same as linking to your affiliate link!
The .htaccess Method
If you are hosted by a Linux machine, you may be interested by the file named .htaccess. This file could be used for multiple purposes. Note that you may need to ask your host provider how to enable the usage of this file. For the benefit of this article, let me explains how you can use it to hide your affiliate link:
1. Find the .htaccess file on the proper folder.
2. Open it or create it if it doesn’t exist.
3. Go at the end of the file and insert the following code:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule^affiliate1.php$ http://www.affiliateprogram.com?ref=id [R]
4.Customize the .htaccess file by changing the target file and the affiliate link.
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