There are several reasons why you should want to hide a link. If you for example are promoting an affiliate program you don't want your visitors to see your affiliate code before they click on the link since that could cost you not just only a few bucks but actually alot of money.Most people are so smart today that they understand that if they click on an affiliate link you will earn money from their purchase, money they could have received themselves by signing up for the same affiliate program and clicking on their own link.

This is even more important if you sell using Clickbank since you don't have to sign up for a specific product, just have an account with Clickbank. There are of course also other reasons for wanting to hide where your links are going.

To get around this problem (it's not a perfect solution but it will save you a couple of bucks) you can mask your links in various ways. Some ways better than others, but it's better then nothing at all.

Clickbank Hoplinks

Since I've already mentioned Clickbank as an example, we'll continue down that road. In the Marketplace Clickbank got a way to create "masked" links by encrypting your Clickbank nickname and the sellers id. So instead of using a link like

http://zzzzz.bookdemon.hop.clickbank.net/

You get a link like this instead:

http://eba9255hwy0u7y0-rgo3mjpg5i.hop.clickbank.net/

This way it's impossible to see that your Clickbank nickname is zzzzz and the seller is bookdemon. By using the encrypted link you make it harder for anyone trying to earn the commission themselves by replacing zzzzz with their own nickname. It's still possible to get hands on your commission, but it's much harder.

The downside with this kind of links is that they still show you're promoting a Clickbank product and you need to make sure you copy the text exactly.

In next part I will show you how to mask your link using a simple Javascript.

You may also be interested in...
How to hide your affiliate links – part 5
How to hide your affiliate links – part 3
How to hide your affiliate links – part 2

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 2nd, 2009 at 8:00 pm and is filed under Affiliate Programs, The World According to Xavier, Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.