Create a redirect page for your affiliates...
After reading Humor Writer Cries in Beer as Pitch to Affiliates "Strikes Out", David Lovelace of eBay Platinum Profits sent me the following note:
Dear Rosalind, Do you have 2 minutes to confirm something for me? I just looked over your post and saw something that I had never heard or thought about before. I use (a specific product) to make sure my affiliates' links are cloaked throughout the process. But I've been thinking of opening a CB account without the script. So when you said,
1. He should do the quick fix to prevent his affiliates' ID's from showing in the address bar which consists of creating a page that redirects to 'http://www.wahumorway.com/index.html'. 2. That redirect page gets listed as his sales page in the Clickbank interface.
... a light came on. Great tip for those not using a 3rd party affiliate script. I would never thought to do it that way. Let me run this by you to make sure I understand this. Could you confirm if this is correct? I use re-directs all the time when promoting affiliate products, so I understand that (and the code used). I have used both .php and .html code to do this. In your experience, does one cloak better than the other? Which do you use? If I'm translating your tip correctly..
I'll create a re-direct page (ie, www.myproduct.com/sales.html) making sure that it directs to www.myproduct.com
Then put www.myproduct.com/sales.html as the home page inside the CB admin.
Then when anyone clicks on a CB generated link, the re-direct process will cloak the affiliate ID so that only www.myproduct.com only appears in the browser?
I appreciate your time in confirming this. Dave Lovelace eBay Platinum Profits Hey Dave! You got it exactly right, and thanks for spelling it out! :-) For those unfamiliar with creating an HTML redirect, here is the code I use for the Clickbank redirect to the Super Affiliate Handbook:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title>Super Affiliate Handbook </title>
<meta http-equiv="REFRESH" content="0;url=http://www.superaffiliatehandbook.com"></HEAD>
<body>
</body>
</html>
I saved this page as "index.html" and uploaded it to a directory called 'cb' at http://www.superaffiliatehandbook.com. The actual URL is
http://www.superaffiliatehandbook.com/cb/index.html That full URL is then listed as the "
Hoplink target URL" in my Clickbank account. Notice how it redirects to the homepage when you click it? The same thing happens when someone clicks on one of my affiliate's CB links for the Super Affiliate Handbook. The visitor doesn't see the affiliate ID, but the cookie is preserved... which makes everyone happy! See how easy that is?
As a Clickbank affiliate, I thank all CB merchants who take the time to hide our affiliate links. Cheers, Ros