I love affiliate marketing. It’s so nice to sell other people’s products and never have to create any of my own. But affiliate marketing and the links required to make sales have been a pain in the butt for years.

For years I was satisfied with using affiliate links as is. Not too bright on my part as most of my links were Clickbank affiliate links which had my user ID and referrer ID right in the link. It was so easy for anyone to just change my ID to their own and BAM there goes my sale.

Even though Clickbank eventually cloaked their affiliate links, somewhat, they are still easy to figure out. Also people can still look at them and see that they are affiliate links and you know many people just run from affiliate links.

I have people tell me, numerous times, that I should hide or cloak my affiliate links. Well I tried using a URL shortener so the links didn’t look like affiliate links but soon found that didn’t work all that well either.

Then I was introduced to PHP REDIRECTS.

I quickly saw my earning increase, almost over night. Not sure why I didn’t do this a long time ago.

Setting up a redirect looks like I am sending visitors to another page on my site but in reality I am sending them anywhere I want and they won’t see it as an affiliate link.

Example:

1. The old way: Using the old method which was not doing anything an affiliate link might look like the following:

http://yourid.petsitterb.hop.clickbank.net?tid=ffw

Were you can see your ID and the referrer’s ID, and is easily messed with so that you lose the sale. Also it scares people off quite often.

2. The redirect method: This method has a bit of code that is saved as an index file in a folder you create on your web site. When any one sees the link they see you have it pointing at a folder on your site, so it looks normal, but when they click it they are taken to the link you provide in this little snippet of code. Very easy.

The follow code is an example:

<?php
$strKeyword = $_GET['kw'];
header( ‘Location: http://yourwebsite.com/folder-name’. $strKeyword ) ;
?>

All you need to do with this code is create the folder first, create a file called index.php and copy the code into the source code of the page. Just be sure to change the URL in the code so that it reflects your site and folder. It’s that easy.

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