I recently read this post Stop Losing Money! | How To Mask Your Affiliate Links | The Net Fool.

First let me say I really enjoy reading Jim’s Blog, It is very well laid out and contains great content, props are deserved for sure.

As far as cloaking your affiliate links and buying programs like that of WP - Affiliate Pro, have you ever seen the V8 drink commercials, yeah the smack on the head is what comes to mind. Jim hit the nail on the head with this one. Simply put, with a little research, shelling out your had earned cash can be avoided when you need a simple solution to cloaking your affiliate links. I like Jim’s solution it is a great example of a simple problem solver and best of all, it is free. However, if you need a little more robust system and easier management of links I have the end all solution for you, and of course it is free. This solution is comprised of a free plugin for Wordpress, and a script I whipped up. Now for the ingredients in my yummy recipe.

1 part redirect page template for wordpress

Combine with

1 part Exclude Pages plugin

Now let’s expand on Jim’s solution with a simple redirect page template for Wordpress. Here is the Code for our redirect page script.


/*
Template Name: Redirect
*/

if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post();

$redirect_meta_key = “redirect”;
for ($i = 0; $i < 2; $i++) {
$redirect = get_post_meta($wp_query->post->ID, $redirect_meta_key, true);
if(” != $redirect) { header(”Refresh: 0;url=$redirect”); exit; }
$redirect_meta_key = “Redirect”;
}

endwhile; endif;

To use this code copy the above and open your favorite text editor and paste the code in between your open and closing php tags. Then save the file as redirect.php and upload it to your currently active theme directory. Log into your Wordpress Blog, go to the write/pages menu to create a new page. Type the title of your product lets say you were marketing Ewen Chia’a Autopilot Profits you could type Autopilot Profits as the title and for the body of the page just repeat the title. Now select the page template on the right and choose Redirect. One last step, on the bottom you are going to add a custom feild and for the “Key”, type in all lowercase “redirect” without the quotes! Now enter your affiliate URL and click “add custom field”. Now publish your page and view your blog to make sure the new page link is working.

So now we have a new page that redirects to our chosen affiliate link and is completely cloaked appearing as part of your blog. Nice huh?

You maybe reading this and saying to yourself, “That is great but I don’t want a whole bunch of links under my pages section to the affiliate programs I am promoting.”. Well my friends that is where the Exclude Pages plugin is added to our tasty recipe.

You can download the Exclude Pages plugin here.

After you download and upload the plugin to your plugins directory go ahead and activate it. From now on, when you create or edit a Page, there will be a new selection on the right called Navigation. This is where you can choose whether or not the page will be visible on your blog.

So now what we have created is a Wordpress page that redirects to our Affiliate link and is or isn’t visible from your blog. Pretty sweet I would say. Now you could take the above script even further and set it so that the Redirect URL loads in an IFRAME but sometimes this will mess up the affiliate tracking in poorly created scripts and some browsers have a security restriction against this. This is fully tested with 2.3.3 only, have gotten around to installing 2.5. Well happy cloaking and I hope this brings you more money then you would get without having it.

Technorati Tags: Cloaking Affiliate Links, Free Redirect Script, Make Money Online

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