Previously in this article series we've had a look at how to hide your affiliate links with various degree of difficulty. This time it's time for some really easy ways to hide your links.

Now it's time to have a look at some easy to use link shortener services you can use without any programming or coding at all

TinyURL

This service is one of the bigger services to cloak or hide links and that's both good and bad. The bad things are that they are well known by anyone and spammers tend to abuse their service . The good thing is that they're really big and the chance that they will be gone tomorrow is really small.

Like most link shortener services you just fill in your long link on their main page and submit the form. It's nice that you can get a custom alias for your short link since that makes it so much easier for you to remember

TinyURL got a browser toolbar, so you don't even have to visit their site at all to create short links.

RT.nu

This service is mainly created for social media networks like Twitter where you're limited to only 140 characters in your messages and that's the reason why they offer so much shorter links than TinyURL for example. Like TinyURL they offer a browser plugin so you can create short links from the browser, but you can also fill out a form on their main page. The downside is that you can't chose any alias for your links. The good thing is that they offer an API you can use to build RT.nu into your own services.

I have to say that I really love the design on all sites from Mesiab Labs

The downside when you use services like TinyURL and RT.nu is that most people know that you're trying to hide the destination since this services are well known by most. That will remove some "trust points" from what you're saying, but it's still much better then to not hide your affiliate links. The good things with all these services are that they're easy to use and you don't have to do any programming at all

You may also be interested in...
How to hide your affiliate links – part 3
How to hide your affiliate links – part 1
How to hide your affiliate links – part 2

This entry was posted on Monday, September 14th, 2009 at 8:06 am and is filed under Affiliate Programs, Social Media, The World According to Xavier. 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.