(Please bear with my bookmark posts a while longer, it’s part of my atttempt at playing catch-up for my One Page A Day challenge which I plan to complete by the end of Friday (today, yikes!))

I’ve been bloghopping through a huge number of affiliate marketing-related sites last month as I was preparing to launch another niche site based on the WordPress platform. One of the essentials I have to set in the new site is the ability to cloak affiliate links to improve the click-through rates. I found two… er, well… applications, if you may call it that, which I plan on using, though I haven’t really tried them and made a choice of which one I’d utilize.

W-Shadow developed a Link Cloaking Plugin for WordPress and is pretty much well-supported by its developer. I suppose it’s a nice alternative to other “affiliate link manager” (as they like to call themselves, but they’re just fancy words for masking or cloaking links! ) scripts out there, and it seems pretty easy to install, although from reading the comments it also looks like you need to meddle a bit with your htaccess file to make it really work well.

After reading Kidino’s post on losing ClickBank sales, I followed a link through one of the comments which led to Ed Zivkovic’s URL Redirect Generator, a software that creates HTML files to redirect your affiliate links. Once these HTML files are created, you would need to upload them into your site, preferable to a dedicated folder for convenience sake, and then add a link from your proper site to that HTML redirect page. I thought it would be a hassle at first, having to FTP every single URL to the server, but I thought it may be simple as well if your web hosting account has those built-in file manager so that you can just upload through there.

The former looks good if I have too many affiliate links, and the latter is good because of its simplicity. I’ll make up my mind later on which one I’d use.

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