I got quite a few emails around the How To Effectively Cloak Affiliate Links post I recently made citing some other sources and techniques to cloak affiliate links. A couple of them were so good I decided to write a quick follow up to let you all know too.

Firstly a guy over at http://studge.com/hiding-links-with-php-and-counting-clicks-with-mysql/ has made a superb and very easy to follow guide on cloaking links using php while being able to count the clicks for each link using a mysql DB. Very clever little script you can include on any site in about 5 mins.

The other source was http://teamtutorials.com/web-development-tutorials/how-to-redirect-affiliate-links which gives another great php based affiliate link cloaking solution.

A few people also pointed out how straightforward it is to just use the htaccess file to perform the actual redirects. Instead of using any specific programs or scripts you can in fact just type the following

Redirect /cloaklinks http://xxxxxxx.cloaklinks.hop.clickbank.net/

Into your htaccess file and you can the direct people to

www.coffeeblack.co.uk/cloaklinks

Instead of the long affiliate link.

Which brings me to the final recommendation which is the Affiliate Link Cloaker software. I normally dont recommend paid software but around 8-10 people have suggested this software to me now so i started to take notice. When you have multiple sites all promoting different programs this now seems to be the best tool going. I have linked straight to it using www.coffeeblack.co.uk/cloaklinks so you can see how a htaccess redirect works and visit it in one go Good luck increasing your affiliate commissions.

I just got an email about 30 mins ago and have been reading it since.

The email was from andy jenkins and brad fallon. you have probably been on the receiving end of some well fashioned emails from them at some point in the past. one of the things that brad and andy do better than anyone else is create a need for an item.

You will never get a one time offer from them. You will get a one time offer that you heard about weeks ago and now it has arrived it has blown everything else out of the water and is going fast but there is still a couple of spaces left if your quick enough.

What this email said, and the reason I have chosen to post about it, is that they have some proof that you can kick pages out of google using proxies. I have read through and i understand the basics that you use a proxy to give google another “Home page” in effect removing the usual index.htm

I suggest everyone reads it just in case this is real.

Either that or its some decent scare mongering and for some reason they want poeple on their mailing list to stop using proxies

But then again I can be paranoid sometimes.

Link to the original post and full explanation

Cloaking affiliate links is neither a bad practice or something to be frowned on.

Unfortunately the word “Cloak” has now been linked closely with black hat tactics and some people now question any time you mention the word Cloaking.

This post is to try and explain how affiliate cloaking works and the reaons for it as affiliate link cloaking serves two useful purposes.

1. It allows you to have a link which appears aesthetically pleasing
2. It allows you to protect your affiliate links from “Commission Thieves” or untrusting members of joe public who think it is a scam of some sort.

Now my affiliate link for the clickbank product domain dashboard for instance will appear as

http://www.domain-dashboard.com/?hop=affidd

This means that when someone clicks through the link and then clicks on the buy button I will recieve a commission from that sale.

Now clickbank adverts are pretty easy going as far as URL’s go but when you get further into affiliate marketing you may have 3 or even four parameters which you want passed along with a url.

You may have the domain

www.example.com/

Then you will have the product which you are referring them to

?productID=34556&

Then you will have your tracking ID

AFFID=27728&

You may have webtrends tags or other tracking so you know where your visitors are coming from and where your google adwords cash is best spent

WTid=wt_newtag

So now your entire URL is

www.example.com/?productID=34556&AFFID=27728&WTid=wt_newtag

Now that URL is a scary URL to some web users and also a savvy web user may recognise the AFFID part as the affiliate link and for some reason people tend to strip out affiliate links when they buy things.

I have no idea why but it seems like your doing something wrong or getting a worse deal if someone is making money from your sale.

Also if I ever see an affiliate link I normally find out how to join and get the commissions myself.

There are a few options.

First get your affiliate link and make sure it is working ok

Then you go to http://www.echoecho.com/toolbrowserredirect.htm and put the details of the affiliate link into each of the available slots so that the redirect will work for most browsers then you copy the code that is created and put it into the <head> tags in a new webpage.

Save that webpage as something easy to remember such as a.html and upload it to one of your sites.

For example that domain dashboard link I showed you higher up is now residing at

www.guidetoaffiliates.com/DD.html

Much nicer URL if you ask me.

Another way of securing your affiliate commissions is to use Profit Protector. Its a fairly simple piece of software that is free and very effective.

First things first Download Profit Protector

Now you simply enter the Affiliate URL plus the name and title of your new page and click create.

Profit Protector does something that the redirect does not and that is when you redirect someone to the new affiliate page it load up the affiliate but keeps your URL in the top bar.

I believe this is using a full size frame to show the content but I am not sure. What I do know is that it works for protecting your affiliate commissions.

I will hopefully provide a few more tips on affiliate linking soon. Keep your eyes open

Setting up a niche blog network can be challenging and managing it after its launch can be an even more daunting task so I have put the following together as an example of what I believe to be “Best Practice” for the problems you will face, but also what the potential profits and benefits are.

Now the first thing you will be looking at is how to set up the individual blogs on your network and call me old fashioned but I do like the manual way of doing things.

I say get you’re hosting with Cpanel and click through to fantastico and press install on the wordpress button.

The funny thing is that most people don’t even realize there is an automated wordpress setup built into every Cpanel hosting account but before you even do that you need to look at the following few points before you dive in.

To make your blog network the puppy’s privates of blog networks and attract the most business you are going to have to look at a few things.

Firstly the blogs will need to be unique. This means not relying on someone else setting the blogs up for you and choosing the first rss feed that comes to mind for content.

Second. You need to have a wide range of niches so you can cater to everyone who may ask for a backlink or an article to be posted.

Third. You are going to need to put some work into getting pagerank for each of the blogs. This is an important factor for many internet marketers and will be a good example of your blog networks strength.

Fourth. SEO quality. The blogs will need to be hosted on different class c IP addresses. For those of you who don’t know what this means just do a Google search for explain class c ip’s. You also need to consider the actual content on the blogs. Having a regularly updated site is one of the best ways to ensure Google likes your site.

Fifth. Ensure that you promote your blog network as if it were your favorite site. This means submitting to directories and gaining backlinks. Write articles and post links back to the original etc. Your blog network needs to be active and actively promoted.

With these 5 main points in hand you can start to install your blogs and get the content rolling. How do I do that? I hear a few of you ask. Setting up wordpress is as easy as clicking the install button in fantastico and entering a few usernames and passwords. To create the content you will need a plugin called wp-o-matic and you will also need a nice looking theme to make your blog stand out a little.

When choosing the theme if possibly try to use one where you change the header and look of the site without changing the footer files at all. If you can succeed in doing this you open up another revenue possibility which we will discuss later.

When making your blogs you will probably find it easier to set them up in blocks of 10 - 15 at a time and get these functional and running before continuing. Do also keep a track of all of the details for each blog. As an example I set up a spreadsheet to keep track of the theme, rss feed, niche and footer style of each new blog.

“Quick Tip Don’t forget that many themes come with Google adsense already installed so be sure to include your adsense id. If you not in the Google adsense program already then sign up.

There is a piece of software I use to manage all of my Websites including my blog network and it will save you an enormous amount of time and energy in managing your blog network.

Domain Dashboard has a lot of features which will start helping you from here onwards. It has a bulk FTP feature which allows you to FTP a single file to a hundred or a thousand different sites. I don’t need to tell you how useful that can be when you’re trying to upload a new footer to 200 blogs.

Domain Dashboard also provides very useful management tools such as fetching statistics for every site and displaying

• Pages indexed
• Backlinks for every major search engine
• Pagerank for each site
• Traffic including unique visitors and bandwidth usage
• And robots/spiders visits.

To begin with I managed my blog network with another 2 people taking around 100 sites each. Now, using Domain Dashboard, I can see which sites need attention or more SEO work for link building etc without having to do 3-4 days research first. I don’t think I could manage my network without Domain Dashboard but if you want to keep it relatively small then you can probably manage it.

Anyway back to the blog network setup. Once you have installed wordpress, wp-o-matic plus your chosen theme you will need to decide where your RSS feed to auto post your content will come from. This was possibly one of the most difficult parts for me to complete as choosing a good relevant feed is a very important part. Unless you are going to hire a team of writers you will need to take this part seriously also. One of the benefits of WP-o-matic is that you can include more than 1 feed and this is another great time saving tip for your blog network.

Make 1 main master blog which you only post articles which you want to appear across all of your blogs. (this will usually be articles someone is paying you to promote) now signup every one of your blogs to the rss feed made by this blog aswell as the main rss content feed and you have a fully functioning blog network where you can post a single article to every site on the network in one move. Just by posting it to your main blog all of your other sites will pick it up.

You may want to take this a step further and have some of your blogs only pick up one category from your master blog so that you can post to say 50 or 100 blogs at a time.Now you can really take part in the opportunities owning a massive quality blog network provides.

I will be writing a follow up to this soon with details on how you can promote your blog and other ways of setting up your blog network