Making money through affiliate programs is a very good and popular way to earn money online from your website or a blog. This article will help you to get out the maximum productivity and functionality for your own affiliate links. Making a quality masked affiliate link can boost a link click-through rating and by that earnings through it.

Masking an affiliate link can be a tricky business, but it can be done for any website or a blog system. Here, I will show you the most popular and most effective ways to mask your affiliate links. I will concentrate more on the popular blogging systems like Blogspot or Wordpress, but some of these techniques can apply on any website.

Main Difference

Most of you would like what is a difference between non-masked (original) and masked affiliate links. An original affiliate links usually has a long and not-friendly URL. Most users, which are able to see the targeted link, probably would not click on it. An experienced users can easily discover where is that URL pointed at (non-masked).

A main difference can be shown on the below example.

Original Affiliate Links (example):

www.youraffiliatesite.com/aff/linkid=294357382394_j42

Masked Affiliate Links can looks like:

www.yoursite.com/aff

www.yoursite.com/go/aff

Please note that these links shown above are just used for the example. Masking an affiliate link can improve your click-through rating and sales/leads for your affiliate partners. If you mask your affiliate link properly, even an experienced user could not discover what is behind it – until he or she clicks on it of course.

Masking your affiliate links can easily force all potential visitors to click on them, excluding the option for them to manually change or edit your targeted URL.

How to Mask your Affiliate Links

There are many ways to mask your own affiliate links, to successfully improve and boost your click-through rating and earnings through affiliate networks.

Redirect through .PHP File

You can use a simple redirection file with your own link inside to automatically redirect and mask your own affiliate links. After applying this trick, your redirection file would look like http://www.yoursite.com/go/link

This is one of the easiest ways to redirect your affiliate links. I have to note that this trick can be applied on almost any website or self-hosted service. Below, I will show you how to do this in a few simple steps.

• Create a redirection folder – You should create a redirection folder where you are going to place your redirection files. This folder is usually placed in your root-directory. Note that you can create any name you want. I would go with creation of yoursite.com/go/ folder.
• Redirection file – Now, you should create your own redirection file. Open your html editor (notepad would work fine), and add the following lines in it.

<? header("Location: YOUR-AFFILIATE-LINK"); ?>

You should change the YOUR-AFFILIATE-LINK with your own full affiliate link, starting with http://

• Save and Upload the file – All you need to do now is to save and upload this .php file on your website folder, created on previous step. You should place a name for this file, related to your affiliate name. From now, you can link anywhere you want to your affiliate link. It will be nicely masked and user-friendly.

You should know that you are not required to place these files on the folder. To remove the /go/ part in your links, all you need to do is to upload them directly into your root-directory.

Redirect through 301 Redirection

Another very effective and one of the simplest ways to setup an masked affiliate links is to do it through the 301 redirection from your htaccess file on your site root folder.

You should note that’s not recommended for the amateurs. Some valuable settings may be included in your htaccess file, so you need to be a very careful changing it.

Anyway, all you need to do is to add following code in your htaccess file:
Redirect 301 /name http://your-affiliate-link
And it’s done. Now your link yoursite.com/name would link to your affiliate link.

Redirect through URL Redirection Services

Today, here are a many quality and useful URL redirection services on the internet. Thanks to the Twitter, the URL Redirection services becomes so popular and well-known places on the internet.

Of course, you can use these services to automatically mask your affiliate links to shorten ones:

• TinyURL – One of the oldest URL redirection services on the internet.
• Doiop – A very simple URL redirection service which allows you to choose a name for your links.
• Bit.ly – A simple URL shortener with opportunity to track your link clicks.
• is.gd – Another very popular URL redirection service on the internet.

All above URL shortening services on the internet can mask your own affiliate links (or any link you want) easily and completely for free. You should try how they works on the practice.

You should look for the redirection or affiliate-related plug-ins available for your Content Management System as Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal. Most of them have a good and quality plug-ins that will try to mask your links easily.

Related posts:

1. How to Become a Better Affiliate
2. Find Good Affiliate Products for your Blog
3. Ad Networks VS. Affiliate Programs
4. Affiliate Programs Suitable for Bloggers
5. Affiliate Programs Introduction