Hiding affiliate links in Ezines

[manolosal]

Hi.

I´m starting out with CBMall, just to get the feeling of affiliate marketing. I want to send an ad to an Ezine, but I can´t find any software to hide my aff links on emails. The mouse-over script and the Clickbank script don´t hide it in the status bar of the email, so it´s easily found.

Any ideas?

Thanks everybody in advance.

[Jim Hutchinson]

One way you can hide the affiliate links and have the added benefit of tracking clicks in your web log, is to add a simple link at the top of a page you create for each affiliate program you're redirecting to. Copy and paste the code below into a new web page and change the links to whatever you want. What it does is show the age with your link for 2 seconds, then refreshes the page and transports the visitors to the URL you choose. You can lower the time the page is on screen by changing the CONTENT="2; to CONTENT="1; or even change the number to 0 so it won't show at all.

[manolosal]

Hi Jim.

Thank you very much for the code, it looks very useful. I´ll use it as soon as I get my website running.

Does it work with emails? I need to cloak my links in the ads and newsletters I´m planning to send.

Thanks again for your help.

Manuel

[Jim Hutchinson]

For emails, you'll want to go a little more complex, but not by much. Do you have a website you can use for now? To use this method you need a site to put it on - preferably one that's hosted on Linux. No? No worries, Try http://www.tinyurl.com to generate redirect links.

Open your favorite text editor, like Windows Notepad. At the top, put this:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://your-affiliate-link.com

Change your-affiliate-link.com to your affiliate link. Now save the file as htaccess.txt. Either start up your FTP program or go into the file manager in the website's control panel. Create a folder on the website that you'll be linking to. Give it a hort, descriptive name. The upload the htaccess.txt file into that folder and rename the file to .htaccess (DOT htaccess).

Try the link by typing it into your browser. You should be redirected to your affiliate site.

Hope this helps.

Jim

[barberic]

Okay, I guess I'm not very techie . . .

[Jim Hutchinson]

Let's take this a step at a time. Your site must be hosted on a Linux/Unix-like server. I don't think .htaccess files work on Windows. To find out what yours is, check your welcome email from when you ordered hosting or contact your hosting company for details.

1) Open Windows Explorer and navigate to the folder your website files are stored. Create a folder in there where you'll keep all of your redirected affiliate links. (Mine is simply the number 1)

2) Go into the new folder (1) and create another one called superaffiliate.

3) Open Window Notepad or similar text editor (I always use NoteTab) and on the first line, put the following to turn on the rewrite engine:
RewriteEngine On

4) On the next line you will enter the URL of your affiliate link. Let's take the Super Affiliate Handbook as an example. (replace alliednet with your ClickBank ID)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://alliednet.webvista2.hop.clickbank.net

5) Save the file as .htaccess inside the folder 1/superaffiliate If Windows complains that you need a file name, save it as htaccess.txt and we'll change it later.

6) Open your favorite FTP program (CuteFTP, WS_FTP, etc) and log into your site. Inside the folder where all your public files are (usually data or public_html) create the folder name that you did in Step 1.

7) Double click that new folder name so you are inside it. In the local panel, find the folder of the same name, double click and you will see the other new one, superaffiliate. Upload that folder to the server.

If you saved the file as htaccess.txt, on the server side, double click the superaffiliate folder so you're looking at the contents. Right click the htaccess.txt file and rename it. (Usually if you click twice slowly it will highlight blue and allow you to edit the name) Now type .htaccess (nothing before the dot) and press Enter to save the changes.

9) Testing time. Your link will look like this, only replace the domain name with yours: http://www.websitemanagers.net/1/superaffiliate

10) Once you verify the link is working you're ready to promote it to your heart's content. As an added bonus, check your site's log files (if you put the link on your site) to see how many people click the link.

Summary:
* Make sure you're on a Linux-like server (call your host)
* Use a plain text editor to create the .htaccess file and upload it to your site using ASCII mode. Setting your FTP program to Automatic will do the trick too.
* The contents of your .htacess file will look like this:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://alliednet.webvista2.hop.clickbank.net

* Your resulting cloaked link will look something like this:
http://www.websitemanagers.net/1/superaffiliate

I hope this all makes sense. If you still want help getting this set up, contact me offline using the contact form on my site http://www.websitemanagers.net

Jim Hutchinson