Cloak Your Landing Page Links

This tutorial shows you how to use a .htaccess file to cloak your landing page links. With only one simple file you can cloak any number of links in your landing pages. With only 1 file to worry about it makes it much easier to edit your cloaked links as opposed to using html where you'll need to edit every html file relating to a particular link. You can still use it with My-Linker links for link tracking as well but this will allow your links to keep the same URL as your site. Keep your links secure. Cloak them.


Intro

Cloaking your affiliate links is an effective way of preventing people from stealing your commissions or just not clicking on them because they look like an affiliate link. A "cloak" is simply just a redirect. There are various methods of doing this but using HTACCESS is my favorite. It's Free, it allows me to manage as many redirects as I want, and it's easy to manage with just a single file. Also with using html to redirect my file all someone has to do is look at the source code of my site and read the html where my links are plain to see. With htaccess if they try to read my source code they'll see the links as I want them to see them, the same way they appear on the website. The reason is that my actual affiliate links are hidden away in the .htaccess file on my server.

There are a number of reasons why not to link directly to an affiliate page with your ID. The obvious reason is that it advertises your affiliate ID and the program your using to everyone who hovers their mouse over your link. Some people are also hesitant of clicking on affiliate links thinking that all affiliates are just scammers and I'll just go straight to the sites URL thanks.

The other main reason is that a lot of people are wary of clicking on long affiliate links, things with lots of letters and numbers, since they look nothing like the regular links of familiar websites. This seems to be more and more the case as I sometimes see links that are so long they don't fit in the address bar of my browser. People are more likely to click on a link that looks like this, www.mysite.com/myproduct, then one that looks like this, www.affiliatecompany.com/user=6786986,pid?yfd8s8dv7ds888cccuusd88df


Creating the HTACCESS file

To create our .htaccess file we first open up any regular text editor. I use a Windows system, sorry.., so I'd open up notepad.exe and create a file called htaccess.txt . Note: Make sure word wrap is turned off. Your file should be a clean text file without any formatting.

Then just type your file like the example below. Note, the 4 lines below are an example. If you only need to cloak one link you would naturally only have one line. If your cloaking 5 different links, You'd have 5 lines. The name "myCBname" represents your click bank ID and would naturally be replaced with what ever your id is, if you don't use clickbank you'd put whatever affiliate ID your promoting here.

Redirect /acmewidgets http://www.myCBname.acmewidgets.hop.clickbank.net
Redirect /a-reallycool-product.html http://my-linker.com/hop/some-link-I-want-to-track/
Redirect /joe-blow.php http://www.myCBname.a-cool-product.hop.clickbank.net
Redirect /thisis.crap http://www.myCBname.another-cool-product.hop.clickbank.net

The key here is to place the word "Redirect" then a space, then the link that you want to be displayed, ie the link you have in your website, such as "this_is_my_link.html" then another space and finally the actual link you are redirecting to. There are three components. One; Redirect Two; the link you made up; and three; the link you are actually sending people to, each seperated by a space. This way your link will look like "www.mysite.com/my_link.html" but it will actually point to whatever link you want.

You put each redirect on a different line. Starting first with the word "Redirect", then a space and then the relative path HTACCESS is going to intercept.

In the first line in the example above since my second part of it is "/acmewidgets", that means if my domain is: www.affiliateinfozone.com

... And someone goes to:

www.affiliateinfozone.com/acmewidgets

... It will send the user to the third item on that line, my long clickbank hoplink for acme widgets.

The redirect can be any name you want. You could make people think you're linking straight to an HTML file on your site, like in the second example. Or, it could end with ".php" if you want (3rd line) or even something you make up, like "dot-crap" (last example). Whatever you come up with will work. It intercepts based on a match of the text in the second part of the Redirect line and sends you off to the link specified in the third part of the line.

To clarify further. Lets say I'm promoting a product called "Strip That Fat". Hmmm Where did I get that idea from?

My click bank ID is Scottay12, and my website is www.best-diet-plan.com

Feel free to go check out my site, I have nothing to hide, in fact it's a great example of a presell page and converts quiet well, but that's another lesson. Now my links could all show up as http://scottay12.stripfat.hop.clickbank.net

and that's fine, click on them, go to the merchant, buy the product, I get paid. Problem is I'm going to lose a lot of clicks because people are hesitant to click an glaringly obvious affiliate links.

Notice how none of the links on my site show that url though. They all show www.best-diet-plan.com/stripthatfat.htm however I can assure you the actual URL they go to is the first one I showed you.

The .htaccess file I use is only one line;

Redirect /stripthatfat.htm http://scottay12.stripfat.hop.clickbank.net

Notice the three parts,

1, "Redirect" and then a space

2, "/stripthatfat.htm" this is the fake link I'm using, followed by a space.

3, "http://scottay12.stripfat.hop.clickbank.net" this is the actual link people go to.

Feel free to use the links I've displayed here in any of your online content. ; ), just kidding..

Now I could easily do this with an http redirect, but let's say I have a site that sells a dozen different products and I change them all the time. Now it's a huge hassle to manage all these files, and all the links. That's where the beauty of .htaccess comes in. All I need to do is change one thing in my file "http://scottay12.stripfat.hop.clickbank.net" to "http://scottay12.4idiots.hop.clickbank.net" and suddenly I'm selling Fat loss 4 idiots instead of Strip that fat. How simple is that? Notice how all I had to do was change "stripfat" to "4idiots"? Edit 1 line and every link I had that went to Strip that fat now goes to Fat loss 4 idiots. Now obviously I'd need to change the pictures I have but you get the idea.


Uploading The File

To upload the file you'll have to use an ftp program like core FTP lite which I found to be very easy to use. You can get a copy of it here,
www.coreftp.com

Just modify the htaccess.txt file to your needs, save it as "htaccess.txt", upload it to your hosting server in the same directory as the pages that have the links, then chmod the file to 755 [This refers to the permissions granted to the file, check your FTP program to see how to do this]. In CoreFTPlite you right click on the file name, select Properties at the bottom of the menu that comes up and enter 755 for a value in the dialog box. Then rename the file to .htaccess with that dot in front. In coreFTP just right click on the file and select rename from the menu that pops up and type in the new name .htaccess .

The file may disappear to you, because it becomes a hidden file by default, but if you need to come back to it later you can still see it with many FTP programs. Just check the help file that comes with your program and search for how to show hidden files. If you can't see it doesn't matter anyway since you can edit it on your computer, re upload it, change it's name again and it'll just overwrite the old one. Now surf to your site and check your handiwork.

If your unsure of how to do all this FTP stuff Deb Williams has a great video tutorial within the Share zone which you can watch here, https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/share_zone/view/233


Conclusion

That's it. Now all your links can look like they exist on your own website like www.mysite.com/clickhere.htm and people won't notice the redirect until after it's happened. By then they're at the merchants site and hopefully getting out their credit card.

If you have any questions feel free to PM me.

And please rate this tutorial by clicking on the stars up top. I hope you found it helpful.

Thanks,
Scott aka Scottay