The fact is — most people don’t click affiliate links nor trust them. Just imagine, every time you enter a store, (this happens especially often in cosmetics / pharmacy stores) — you enter willing to buy Product A, face an assistance who has a badge on her chest saying “Product B”, who starts talking you over into buying the product she advocates. You know she gets a commission off every sale, and even if Product B is not that bad, you will not trust her “objective” opinion, right?
Same on the internet. If I will write a review about how fantastic product B is, but when reader rolls his mouse over the URL and sees it has a referral extension, he will instantly guess you are just trying to trick him into clicking and buying something that will put a few bucks in your porcelain piggy. So, how to play smart?
1. Use an iFrame to hide your links.
Basically, you are working with a cookie and when it comes to affiliate cookies, all you need to do is set it in your visitors computer. An iFrame allows you to embed another HTML page inside the current page you are displaying, so you load the affiliate page inside your current page using the iFrame, but the trick is to make the iFrame so tiny that the readers wouldn’t be able to see it.
<iframe src=”http://toptut.com/affiliate-URL” width=”1″ height=”1″ frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”no”></iframe>
This code opens the targeted URL in a small (and invisible, due to the size) 1px*1px frame. The affiliate page is there, so the cookie gets set in visitors computer. Tricky enough?
Disadvantages: 1. Some affiliate programs do not allow such play with cookies and will BAN you for this, so you have to make sure it’s not forbidden before you start framing. 2. The visitor still has to visit the target URL and sign up / buy your advertised product.
2. Using php-based redirects.
This is slightly time consuming but I often use it myself and you only need to do the work once. For every affiliate link you promote, create a simple HTML file in your notepad:
<html><head>
<title>Top Tut Money Making Program</title>
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”>
<script>window.location=”http://toptut.com/affiliate-URL“;</script>
<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”1; url=http://toptut.com/affiliate-URL“>
</head>
<body>
<p align=”center”>You are being taken to the correct page.
<br>If the page does load after 5 seconds, please
<a href=”http://toptut.com/affiliate-URL“>click here</a>.</p>
</body></html>
I highlighted the URL, because it appears 3 times in the file and remember to replace it in all the 3 spots when you create your own file. When you are done, save it as .php file, under some nice name without mentioning the word “affiliate”, the site’s name itself would be the best idea (e.g. firefox.php, for Firefox referrals). Create a separate folder on your host and call it “recommended”, then upload the file there. Now, the URL you encourage your visitors to click will be http://www.toptut.com/recommended/text-link-ads.php instead of http://www.text-link-ads.com/?ref=58668 . You CAN make it an .html file as well (just save it as .html and not as .php), but we want to be 1337, right? Much better, much more effective.
3. Using php-based redirects - short way. This is practically same like the method above, but would work only on a php server (you cannot use .html file for this). ALl you need to do is create a file in notepad with the following content:
<?
header(”Location: http://toptut.com/affiliate-URL“);
?>
… and, follow all the steps from the Nr. 2 technique — save it as file.php, upload to your “recommended” folder and use http://www.toptut.com/recommended/file.php link in your website to link to the affiliate program.
Disadvantages: If your reader’s browser does not support redirects, this method will fail, which is why technique Nr. 2 is better — in case auto redirect fails, your reader will have a page offering him to click in order to proceed.
Important Notes:
- NEVER use any of the above methods to hide Google Adsense links, you will get BANNED.
- Read the TOS of your affiliate program before starting to use redirects or iFrames.
- Do not use these methods to trick the Search Engines (I bet you thought about it already!), this can get your website banned.
To sum it up, if your visitors would not know that you are praising your affiliate program, they are more likely to believe, sign up and buy. Ethical? Not really, but then again — do you care if when YOU signed up for Adsense, your current host or bought a domain with a discount, someone somewhere on the planet got a few dollars commission for it?
6 Users Responded in " 3 Ways to Hide Affiliate ID Links and Boost Sales "
Nice article, with the recent changes Text-Link-Ads have made to their URLs and with many other affiliate managers have a habit of changing things around doing something along these lines is critical, updating urls in one place, gives you back the control, saves so much time and you wont miss any of those links you forgot about!
Method 2 can be enhanced to have input the url just one place. Also, can be optimized to have the title and url at the bottom and use it almost mechanically.
Something like this:
window.location=”“;
<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”1; url=“>
You are being taken to the correct page.
If the page does load after 5 seconds, please
<a href=”“>click here.
Thank you for sharing. I am using php-based redirects now, its just take short code.
You can also use free url masking service like: http://shoxt.com
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