Simple Ways To Hide Affiliate Links

I m sure all of you know how important your affiliate link is. And how important that people click on your affiliate link and make a purchase. This means income right? who doesn't want to have higher affiliate income?



But there are many people out there who hijacks and bypass affiliate links. What do i mean by hijacking and bypassing affiliate links?

Hijacking implies that when someone visits your site and click on your affiliate link that brings them to a page to make a purchase. But instead of purchasing under your affiliate id, these people changes the affiliate URL on the address bar to their own affiliate id and make a purchase through their affiliate id.
Example: your affiliate link is www.affiliate-domain.com/ref=youraffiliateid. These people will change it to www.affiliate-domain.com/ref=theiraffiliateid.
This means fall in affiliate income.

Bypassing affiliate link means someone removing your affiliate link and make purchases directly from the site. This is usually done by rolling their mouse over a text that they thinks contains an affiliate link like this: NetAudioAds.The status bar on the bottom of the browser will show the full link such as this:http://www.sellingppp.com/a.cgi?ppp=1202471545 .These people will then chop off the affiliate id off "a.cgi?ppp=1202471545", and only visit the original link: http://www.sellingppp.com/. This means that you do not receive any affiliate commission.

I am going to introduce 2 simple ways of hiding your affiliate link so that it makes them harder to be altered or bypassed.

Method 1: Mouseover Link Hider

You can try hiding the text that appear in the status bar when people roll their mouse over a text that contains affiliate link.Try the Mouseover Link Hider at HTML Basix.

They will generate a html code which looks like this:

a href="YOUR-AFFILIATE-LINK" style="font-size:12px;color:black;font-family:verdana;" onMouseOver="window.status=''; return true;" onMouseOut="window.status=''; " target="_top">TEXT THAT CONTAINS AFFILIATE LINK

Note:remember to add tags '<' at the beginning and < / a > at the end, without the spacings. I took it off so that you can see the whole HTML code.

Just copy, paste and edit the above HTML code. This makes it harder for people to by pass your affiliate link as the full link is not shown on the status bar.

However everything has a downside and there is no exception for this method.
Although affiliate link cannot be seen when a mouse is placed on the text, but the affiliate link will be visible on the status bar when someone applies a right click on the text.

Try this rolling a mouse over. No affiliate link visible. Try right clicking and holding the right click down. Affiliate link is visible in the status bar: sign up

Further more when people click on the link it will bring you to the sales page with your full affiliate link in the address bar. This makes your link more prone to hijacking!

Method 2: ViralURL

Use ViralURL to cloak affiliate links. Don't worry the link to viralurl isn't an affiliate link. In zooble a text that contains affiliate link will have a '(aff)' beside it to tell users that is an affiliate link.
Alright lets get back to topic.

ViralUrl allows you to generate a cloaked link. It is fast and easy to use. For example my affiliate URL is: http://www.sellingppp.com/a.cgi?ppp=12024715 the cloaked link will look something like this: http://viralurl.com/eranium/Pay-Per-Play (http://www.viralurl.com/your-username/title). You can use Mouseover Link Hider to hide this URL so that it will not appear on the status bar. Cloaked Link and Cloaked link + mouseover link hider. Notice that users can still see the URL of the cloaked link in the status bar but not the cloaked link+mouseover link hider.

When users click on the cloaked link, they will be brought to the affiliate page. But the URL on the address bar will be this: http://viralurl.com/eranium/Pay-Per-Play and not your affiliate URL. Thus it makes it harder for them to hijack your affiliate URL.

Before cloaking affiliate links, be sure to read the affiliate guidelines. Some affiliate networks do not allow affiliates to cloak affiliate links.

There are still many more cloaking methods which i will be introducing to you in the near future. Meanwhile, get going and cloak those affiliate links!!