Disguise Your Affiliate Links
25. May, 2010 
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If you’re blogging for dollars and participating in affiliate marketing, one of the major drawbacks that you may not take notice in, although your readers will, is how ‘messy’ some of these affiliate links look to your readers.
There’s nothing ‘wrong’ with looking to make a few bucks to pick up a cup of coffee or to replace your current income by generating income from your blog, many people do it and have become quite successful in doing so. One of the major sources of online income for many come from affiliate marketing, where the blog owner posts up links or banner ads for a specific product that another company or individual is trying to sell. The blog owner, if the product is purchased, is given a slice of the income that is generated from the final purchase, win-win for the blog owner and the affiliate company.
First off, yes…I do participate in affiliate link love and you can see that participation in action to the right of the page. So to use my own efforts as the example, let’s look at why you should consider disguising your affiliate links and of course, how to do so (if you’re running WordPress).
The Good, The Bad and the Ugly
Many online and brink-and-mortar companies understand that one of the best ways to sell their own products is to offer a cut of the profit to bloggers if they are willing to post up an ad or link of said product on their site. Visitors click on these links and if there is a purchase made through that affiliate link, the blog owner gets the cut and can make some decent money if numerous purchases are made.
However, the actual links that are provided to bloggers aren’t exactly the prettiest looking URL out there, and it may be borderline embarrassing for a blog owner to show off that link. If you haven’t been paying attention to what this looks like, here’s what I’m talking about…
Example of Raw Affiliate Link
http://youraffiliatecompany.com/yourafflink=?12345
Not exactly the sexiest thing you want your visitors to see when they’re looking around the joint, eh? There are other concerns beyond aesthetics, there have been reports of link theft where someone can simply sign up to that company as an affiliate, make the purchase and you may lose out on some income on the sell. This is more of a problem for the affiliate companies to deal with, in my opinion, but I also like having that extra java money, but I digress.
The goal of disguising your affiliate links can differ based on your own desires, however, I like to have control over my links in that, when someone looks around the site and happens to come across an aff link here, I don’t want them to believe that the link is untrustworthy. After all, the link is on my site which is tied to my name and if I tarnish my own site, then my name is worthless to you.
The links that I have control over in this aspect, I like to have them as integrated to my site as much as possible, so my aff links all have been altered in such a way where they are connected to my domain until the visitor actually hits the landing page of the affiliate product/service. IN other words, instead of:
http://youraffiliatecompany.com/yourafflink=?12345
affiliate links look like:
http://richwallace.net/go/product.php
Pretty slick, no? Now, sure…you could purchase another plug-in that can do this for you, but we’re trying to make money with our blogs, not spend more money especially when you’re just starting out. I will admit upfront that there will be some small technical work to be done here, but I’ll cover it in as much detail as possible to make this a smooth as possible for you.
Applying the Disguise
If you’re using WordPress as your chosen blog platform and you have access to your hosted files through whatever hosting provider you run with and be able to upload new files to your site via FTP or your hosting provider’s control panel. Rich Wallace dot Net is hosted by HostGator (aff) so I will demonstrate how to get the job done in their environment, but most provider’s share a very similar user experience.
Gather Your Affiliate Links:
May as well grab them all, or at least the ones you are wanting to apply the disguise to before we move on.
Go on, I’ll wait….
Create Your ‘Product‘ Folder and Redirect Files:
Create a new folder on your computer with a name that will ultimately be included in your final affiliate link web address, this could be anything you’d like such as: ‘products’, ‘links’, ‘affiliates’ or what have you. In my case, I simply use the label ‘go’ based on the fact that the link is taking my visitor outside of my own domain when clicked.
I have three main affiliate programs that I work with and those links will be managed by individual text files that are stored within my ‘go’ folder. Within that folder, I have created the three text files and have named them after the affiliate company that they are tied to. The important thing to keep in mind is that you want to file extension to be set to ‘PHP’, which can easily be served up by your host and again, keep everything within your site organized and integrated. Here is a shot of my ‘go’ folder and its contents at this point:
Open your new folder and create a new file for each link you want to create which contain a small piece of PHP code that will redirect your visitor when the file is served up. When we start to link to these affiliate files, the goal is to have the actual web address that will be represented and displayed to your visitors look like:
http://richwallace.net/go/aweber.php
http://richwallace.net/go/godaddy.php
http://richwallace.net/go/hostgator.php
Alter the New Affiliate Files to Redirect Clicks
Let’s open up our first affiliate file, aweber.php, and add the magic!
With our single line of PHP code, all we are really doing is redirecting any clickouts that may be done on the link is taking our visitor to the landing page of our affiliate, but again, the goal is to keep our actual link within the realm of our domain as pretty and integrated as possible.
Upload the New Directory and Affiliate Files
Using FTP, or your hosting provider’s control panel, upload the new folder and its contents to your site, make sure that we aim the upload to the ROOT of your site. I personally use Core FTP as my FTP client but feel free to use your own if desired.
1. Connect to Your Site via FTP
Complete your connection to your site via FTP and ensure that you are at the root folder of your domain:
2. Create Your New Folder on Host
Using your FTP client’s Create Directory function, add the new directory you want to use on your site:
3. Upload Your Affiliate Files into the New ‘Go’ Folder
Pretty much self-explanatory 
That’s it! Now that your files have been uploaded to the new folder on your site, test them out by navigating to those new files via your browser by using the new addresses (note that once the landing page is hit, you lose control of the web address, the address may not look the same as below):
Some bloggers will disagree with me on this, but I’m a stickler on what visitors see while they invest their time to be on my site. Even what seems to be the smallest detail such as a link matters to me and from a marketing perspective, appearance matters, thus my links need to look appealing and not ‘deceptive’ by seeing some link elsewhere from my domain with a bunch of numbers tacked onto the end of it.
Give it a run on your own blog and let me know what you think! Take care and happy blogging!
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