WebDiggin.com: An Adventure to Make Money Online

Cheap web hosts has been leaving a lot of messages on WebDiggin (and building back links to their site), so we followed them back to Web Hosting Reality.

What’s neat is the way they hide their affiliate links in the sidebar. When you roll over them, it’s not obvious that you’re being shipped off to an advertiser with a tracking cookie that will send the blogger a commission if you buy. So we decided to see if we could hide our affiliate links as well…

We learned some things about hiding affiliate links:

1. People have been cloaking affiliate links forever. Apparently not everyone wants to click on an affiliate link with a bunch of symbols, letters, and numbers. Plus, if you see that there’s an affiliate program for the product, you might sign up for the affiliate program yourself to save yourself some money.
   I guess if you’re enterprising enough, you could hijack someone’s affiliate links in a blog. For example, if you could hack in and change the codes in the link to your own codes, it would probably be hard to detect. (Personally, I think this leaves a paper trail to the culprit, but you might never get caught.)
2. You’re not really hiding affiliate links from anyone. Well, that’s not true. My mom wouldn’t recognize an affiliate link, but anyone who blogs to make money will have experimented with Commission Junction or any of the other affiliate networks. Affiliate links are as familiar to some people as Google Ads.

So, who are you really targeting when you hide your affiliate links?

My mom. Well, not specifically my mom, but general websurfers who can navigate the web, hit the back button when they reach really spammy looking sites, and get annoyed when those smiley-face pop-unders appear on their screen.

When you roll over an affiliate link and the bottom of your website browser says you’re going to:

http://www.jdoqocy.com/click-987294782-8234792384?sid=blahblahblah&url=http://moreletters&numbers

Well, it’s just doesn’t look pretty.

Here’s what the internet is telling me about how to make your affiliate links pretty (or “cloaked”)

1. Keith Bond’s post or redirecting affiliate links walks you through how to use a meta refresh. (Basically, you create a regular html webpage for each affiliate link and insert in the following meta-tag in the header:meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0;url=http://youraffiliatelink.com?a=1234?
2. Keith also points out that you could create a single php webpage that could link to all of your affiliate links. Essentially, you would create a redirect.php webpage that looked something like this:
   

   php
   $links = array(
   “link1? => “http://youraffiliatelink.com?a=1234?,
   );
   header(”Location:”.$links[$_GET[’site’]]);
   exit;
   ?

   So, now, instead of linking to your affiliate link, you would link to http://www.yoursite.com/redirect.php?site=link1.

   Personally, I don’t think that looks pretty, but it does the job. Obviously “link1″ would be something more relevant like “Amazon”, but still …

3. I think Web Hosting Reality must do something similar to Keith’s trick, except they’ve created a separate php file for each affiliate link. When you roll over their link for Free $400 of Website Tools, the link reads: http://www.webhostingreality.com/thinkhost.php which is purty. (Jeremy Palmer had a video and post about how to create php files, but the link is now dead.)
4. Keith’s next trick is to use a 301 redirect by editing your .htaccess file. Add a line like:Redirect 301 /link1 http://youraffiliatelink.com?a=1234And then from your blog, just use the link, http://www.yoursite.com/link1
5. Josh Spaulding points out that a lot of people use tinyurl, but recommends the 301 redirect method.

I suppose we could have gone into our .htaccess file to make a 301 redirect, but we had an easier way to do it with BlueHost.

How to hide your affiliate links using BlueHost (or How to Create 301 Redirects Using BlueHost)

1. We logged into our BlueHost control panel and clicked on redirects.

2. Then all we did was add the folder name we wanted to redirect (bluehost) and the affiliate link that we wanted to send it to.

Now, all we do is link to http://webdiggin.com/bluehost and it automatically gets sent to our affiliate link. Pretty and simple. That’s why we like BlueHost.

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