How to Cloak Affiliate Links in WordPress

[djbaxter]

How to Cloak Affiliate Links on Your WordPress Site
WP Beginner
June 10th, 2015

Link cloaking is a technique used to make long affiliate links into a shorter and more branded link.

Often affiliate links are lengthy, hard to remember, and show your affiliate username or ID like this: [noparse]http://www.affiliatesite.com/products/?product_id=123&affiliate=123[/noparse]

Link cloaking allows you to shorten these lengthy ugly link into branded URLs like these: [noparse]http://www.yoursite.com/refer/productname[/noparse]

You can use anything as base URL. We use refer in our cloaked links on WPBeginner. Some other popular URL bases are out, go, recommends, etc.

If you are someone who uses affiliate links in your blogs to make money, then you should to cloak links. Many site owners cloak links to properly manage their affiliate links. Link cloaking allows you to create easy to understand URLs for your outgoing affiliate links. It can also help you add an additional layer of click tracking to ensure you are getting paid for every sale you refer. You can also protect your affiliate links from getting hijacked by using link cloaking. Lastly, cloaked links allow you to easily manage your affiliate links from your WordPress admin interface.

[video=youtube_share;jlqE-bR5L7k]http://youtu.be/jlqE-bR5L7k[/video]

Since affiliate marketing is an important source of income for many bloggers, there are many WordPress plugins available that allows you to cloak your affiliate links and easily manage them.

We have hand-picked some of the best WordPress link cloaking plugins for you. You can use any one of these plugins to easily add your affiliate links into WordPress and cloak them to get maximum benefits.

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[tastandiford]

Another big benefit of this since it is under a domain that you own, you can verify that domain and link to it in your YouTube videos.


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[rvitsentzatou]

Really useful! Thank you for sharing!

 

[Ron Killian]

As stated in the video, Pretty link has been the one I've been using for some time.

Thanks for sharing this

 

[glasseslit]

Thanks for your sharing!

 

[ChristianNetworking]

Wouldn't it be better to create a landing page for the affiliate link? You can track it and easily change the affiliate link if the vendor changes his/hers.

Rick