Easiest Way to Cloak Your Affiliate Links - Awesome New Wordpress Plugin

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If you blog for money, you know that using affiliate links in your posts to promote products that you enjoy is a great way to earn revenue online. But are you cloaking your links? If not, you’re missing out on a lot of potential sales while hurting your site in the process. Below are some important reasons why you should all be cloaking your affiliate links.

4 reasons why you should cloak affiliate links on your blog

1. People may avoid clicking on obvious affiliate links. As Internet users become more aware, they will be less likely to click on links or buy into products that are endorsed only because there is a monetary incentive. You’re not tricking anyone but cloaking just makes your affiliate links less obvious.
2. Cloaking allows for you to insert relevant keywords into your URLs thus making them appear more natural and more enticing for users to click on.
3. Cloaking your links also helps you to avoid automatic scripts that replace your affiliate links with their own. Don’t let these people steal your hard earned commissions.
4. Google may devalue sites with affiliate links in the search engine results pages (due to so many thin affiliate sites that provide no value). This can easily be avoided by utilizing cloaked links.

Up until now, I’ve been cloaking my affiliate links manually by using the simple PHP script below:

header( 'Location: http://AffiliateLinkHere.com/123' ) ;

Although this works pretty well, it’s also very time consuming because each of the php files have to be set up individually.

However, I just recently discovered a Wordpress plugin called Wordpress Link Cloak that automatically does this by rewriting URLs through htaccess. On my end, I just installed the plugin, entered in the keywords I wanted to convert into affiliate links and wala.

This plugin is amazing because you can use any URL directory and file structure that you want. It’s highly customizable and you can easily limit the number of keywords that are converted to affiliate links on the page.

Below are screen shots of some of the options the plugin offers.

At $77, the plugin is not cheap but I didn’t hesitate to get it because it’s something that I’ve been looking for for a very long time. The other cloaking plugins (like WP Affiliate Pro) do not offer this kind of flexibility and actually leave affiliate footprints that I’m sure the search engines can pick up. This one’s definitely under the radar and if you know what you’re doing, you can easily make up the cost with a few sales.

I think someone at Elite Retreat was looking for something like this as well. I wish I had known about this last week so I could sound like I’m smart or something. Haha, oh well.

So I’ll leave you all with that. Check out Wordpress Link Cloak. There’s a video tutorial on there as well if you need more info. If you’re paying attention, you can see that I’m using it here already.