Do you know that by simply cloaking your affiliate links, you can make more affiliate sales?

And the best part is that if you already own a domain name and have your own web host, you can do just that.

The purpose of this article is to give a step-by-step procedure of how to cloak your affiliate links with your own domain name.

WHAT IS AFFILIATE MARKETING?

First thing first…what exactly is Affiliate Marketing?

Simply put, Affiliate Marketing is one of the many Internet Business models to earn a commission by marketing someone else’s products.

Usually, an experienced Internet marketer creates a product (for example, an e-Book explaining how to do something or solve a specific problem) to market on the Internet. Instead of doing all by himself, he can also allow affiliates to market it by paying out a certain commission, which can range from a measly few percent to a huge 75 or even 80+ percent!

AFFILIATE LINKS

Thus, when an affiliate marketer joins the affiliate program, he or she will be given an affiliate link to promote the said product. The affiliate link usually contain an Affiliate ID that is either selected by the affiliate or generated by the system when signing up.

The affiliate marketer can then promote the product via his website, emails, classified ads, etc by quoting this affiliate link.

As long as someone else purchases the product via this affiliate link, the affiliate marketer will get paid the predetermined commission.

WHY MUST YOU CLOAK YOUR AFFILIATE LINKS?

There are at least two reasons why you must cloak your affiliate links.

Firstly, there are reports that sales are “stolen” by other affiliates who simply replace the affiliate links when making purchases.

For example, if I am an affiliate marketer with an online marketplace (such as “successgoldmine.com”) and my Affiliate ID is “rogerloh”, my affiliate link can be something like that:

rogerloh.productname.successgoldmine.com

So, before making a purchase for himself, it is an easy matter for another affiliate with Affiliate ID “dishonest” to substitute mine as shown:

dishonest.productname.successgoldmine.com

Secondly, an affiliate link is usually not-so-nice-looking like this:

www.successgoldmine.com/redirect.html?link=rogerloh

Can you imagine if you get an even longer affiliate link than the one above and placing it into your own email and send out?

Not only the affiliate link may wrap into two lines or more, it is most likely “unclickable”. Thus, it will reduce the chance of a sale when the reader is genuinely interested in the product but does not know to copy and paste the affiliate link into a browser.

HOW TO CLOAK YOUR AFFILIATE LINKS WITH YOUR OWN DOMAIN NAME

Now, let’s get down to the bolts and nuts of the how-to…

For this to work, these are the requirements:

1. You must have your own domain name, eg. www.YourDomainName.com

2. You are able to create a HTML file eg. YourFile.html

3. You are able to upload your file to your website with your domain name.

Here are the steps:

1. Use your favorite HTML Editor (such as Microsoft FrontPage or Nvu) to create a new HTML file.

For example, I created a new file called “bk01_josh.html”

2. Insert the following lines just before the /head HTML tag in your new file.

(NOTE: For technical reasons, I have used square brackets "[" and "]" instead of the angle brackets in the HTML code below.

Please replace the square bracket with the standard HTML angle brackets in the HTML code below after you highlight, copy and paste into your own HTML file.)

[script language="JavaScript"]

[!-- window.location="Your Affiliate Link URL";

// --]

[/script]

3. Upload your file to your website with your domain name.

For example, I used one of my domains “FactsAboutDavinci.com”

Now, all I have to do is to promote this link in my marketing, such as website, emails, etc:

www.FactsAboutDavinci.com/bk01_josh.html

Thus, when someone clicks the above link, it will redirect him or her to the company that markets this product. And now, the link looks much more presentable and professional.