How to Create Redirect Links for Product Owners and Affiliate Marketers

As an affiliate marketer or product owner, you should always cloak your product link, buy now links and affiliate links. This will help prevent theft on multiple levels. If you’re curious how this can be done, keep reading.

Cloaking Links as a Product Owner

If you own your own product and use Clickbank, I highly recommend cloaking your “Buy Now” link. If you decide to use the traditional http://1.vendor.pay.clickbank.net format, then savvy visitors will realize you’re using Clickbank and will replace your affiliate nickname with their own. This will reduce your earnings by as much as 75% depending on your commission payouts. There are 2 ways to counter this problem. The 1st involves using a redirect that “hides” the Clickbank hoplink (scroll down for methods). The 2nd method involves using a “Switch” script that only shows the Clickbank link when a hoplink is detected. Both options work well.

Cloaking Links as an Affiliate Marketer

If you promote Clickbank products as a marketer, I highly recommend cloaking your “Buy Now” link, also. If you use the traditional http://affiliate.vendor.hop.clickbank.net format, then savvy buyers will realize you’re using Clickbank and will replace your affiliate nickname with their own. In this case, you lose the entire commission.

How to Cloak Product and Affiliate Links

There are 2 ways to cloak links. The Manual Way and the Easy Way. Both methods require your own server. But first a warning…

Do Not Use Bit.Ly, TinyURL or other 3rd Party URL Shorteners

Use Your Own Domain for Ultimate Long-Term Control of Your Assets and Links

When you use 3rd party services, you’re placing your future at risk. Bit.ly, for example, does not allow the changing of URL’s once your shorturl is created. So once that ebook goes viral, all the links permanently die. There’s also multiple stories about ShortURL services getting flagged as spam and closing down like Tr.im. Use your own domain always. Ok….I’m glad I got that off my chest. Let’s continue.

The Manual Way to Create Redirects

This method involves FTP’ing into your server and creating “files”. For example, if you own http://www.example.com, you would FTP in, create a new folder called “go” and create a PHP file called “myaffiliatelink.php”. This would create the following link: . You would then paste in the following content in your PHP file:

<?
Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
Header( “Location: http://www.new-url.com” );
?>

Once you save the changes, any visit to that page will redirect to http://www.new-url.com. If you use a non-PHP language, this site offers several options.

The drawback: this process is rather lengthy, manual and painful. If you’re looking for a better solution…it exists.

The Easy Way to Create Redirects

Buy your own link cloaking and redirect software and install it on your server. Then login, create a redirect in a few seconds and continue on with your day. This is much easier and also allows you to see how many people actually clicked on your links.