One of my online revenue sources is trough affiliate program. If you are not familiar with this term, it simply referring your reader to a certain products you are affiliated with, and get paid if they make certain action whether it is buying the products, filling some forms, etc.

To maximize your affiliate earning, there are some tips you can use. One of the tips I’d like to talk today is, masking or cloaking your affiliate link. It is a method to make your affiliate link doesn’t shout “hey I’m affiliate link, if you click me my master will earn some money from you!”.

We have to accept the fact that not all people like affiliate links. That’s why we need to cloak it so the links will look like a ‘usual link’.

There are several ways to cloak our affiliate link, but I usually just use this one method. I call it redirect page. Erm.. perhaps someone before me who create that term, whatever, here is my way to use redirect page to mask my affiliate link.

First, if you see this blog permalink, you’ll see it’s uses something like: http://domain.com/postname. All of my post page will have an url ended with postname, there’s no .html .php or any other endings.

So, what I need to do is simply create a blank page, and call it whatever I want link something.html. You’ll see the difference between the blank page URL and my post page right?

On the blank page, I will name it similar to my affiliate product, let’s say gator.html if I want to promote hostgator.com. There will be no text on the body, but put this code between the <head> tags

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0;
url=http://www.myaffiliatelink.com”>

All I need to do is just edit the “myaffiliatelink.com” with my affiliate link. Upload the page on your hosting at the root, and every time you want to send your visitor to your affiliate link you link it to your blank page.

I’ll give you an example. I will make a link to my affiliate link, and mask it to my redirect page. The redirect page is epowhost.html and it will be redirected to my epowhost affiliate link.

Click Here to test it. Don’t worry, it’s just a simple example, you wont get charged for clicking the link :)

Some people like to use new directory, then host the redirect page on that directory, let’s call it “go”. So the redirect link will be, domain.com/go/redirectpage.html or whatever ending you like.

Whichever method you use, it will bring similar result.