How to Hide Affiliate Program Links in Your Web Sites

Earn More Money with Your Affiliate Programs by Hiding Your Affiliate Links

K. Taylor
If you have a web site and use affiliate programs, you have probably wondered how to hide or mask the links to your affiliate programs. Many savvy web surfers have become familiar with affiliate links and often just copy and paste the link that they want to visit, removing your referral number in the process. This results in a loss in revenue for the web master and this amount can add up greatly over time.

By taking a few extra steps when you add your affiliate links, you can hide the links thus increasing the revenue that your website generates. One of the quickest ways to do this is to create a mouse over. While this does not stop the removal of your affiliate referral number, it does hide it a bit more than if nothing was done. A mouse over is a fairly simple step to add when inserting your links.

Mouse Over

A typical link on your web site would look like this:

clickhere

By leaving the link like this, the surfer can see that they are being referred to an affiliate program when they put their mouse over the link. By adding a few more steps, you can change what the surfer sees when they have their mouse over your affiliate link.

Change your code to this to hide the affiliate link:

Click here

Now when the surfer has their mouse over your affiliate link, they will see what ever message you put into the code where it says, "YOUR MESSAGE HERE".

Redirection Page

Another way to protect your affiliate revenue is to create a redirection page. You can do this by creating a subdirectory such as this:

www.yoursite.com/subdirectoryhere/. You can call the subdirectory anything that you wish. In this subdirectory, create an index page and insert the following code



The xxxx in the url above represents your affiliate number. Change the xxxx to your affiliate ID number.

Now when you want to send someone to your affiliate link, you link to www.yoursite.com/subdirectory/index and it will automatically send the surfer to your affiliate program while keeping your affiliate ID intact. Another bonus to using a redirect page is that this page will be picked up by Google. Anyone accessing this page on your site will also be using your affiliate link instead of having to actually click in the link once on your site.

Published by K. Taylor

I have been a stay at home mom for many years and have always loved to put pen to paper. I have had several articles published on working from home and issues related to telecommuting.   View profile

  • Surfers will often copy your referral link and remove your ID before continuing onto your program.
  • You can use any message you want with a mouse over.
  • A redirect page is quick and a great way to protect your affiliate earnings.
Affiliate programs are a great way for web masters to make money from their web site.

8 Comments

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  • Tom Horton 4/3/2011

    Thank you for this post I have been looking for this for ages for my internet marketing blog

    Thanks

    Tom

  • Steven T 10/15/2009


    I use goaturl.com
    if someone see my shop link as
    www.domain.com/aff/id/$ej3rde/stevent3irj3r9j3r.html

    they would question it and not click now whith goaturl.com ( i am not going to use my real link because this is not a place for spaming my affiliate links) it look like this
    www.goaturl.com/932
    or
    you can add a tag
    www.goaturl.com/yourtag

    Steven

  • Harold 9/19/2008

    Hiderefer.com works great!

  • Bankroll 5/7/2008

    There are so many around the net, but cutelink does a great job http://cutelink.info/FREE Texas Holdem Poker Bankrolls.html

  • Bell 2/24/2008

    I found a new web site http://cutelink.info which works perfectly for this purpose. The site completely hides the affiliate links from visitors. I think that is great. You can also check that.

    How is that site? Am I right?

  • Sandra 11/15/2007

    I plan to set up an affiliate link to http://www.ocoop.co.uk/ocoop-affiliates.htm

    how would I mask this?

  • Iven 9/5/2007

    Site: http://cutelink.info

    The site helps you to make a new cute substitute link for your affiliate links and longer links.

    Here is a working example:

    Actual Link: http://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+love&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

    Cute Link: http://cutelink.info/Love.html

    The main feature I noticed about this tool is that it allows the visitors to make their link's name.

  • Kavita 8/9/2007

    I want to create a separate page for IPO for my blog where one gets Stock Market Tips and Money Making Ideas From Websites Which pays ,but when I try creating using www.yoursite.com/subdirectoryhere/,it says page not found.Now How can I create this page,so that I link to it from main page.

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