Methods to Mask Your Affiliate Links
Posted by Mike | Filed under Affiliate MarketingWhy Mask our Affiliate Links?
Masking will redirect another URL to the affiliate URL so that people will not see the original link in their status bars.
Most affiliate programs give the associates long and “suspicious-looking” URLs as affiliate links. People who see these affiliate links on websites have the tendency to not click them because they think that the links will just give them trojans, viruses, etc. Some web surfers even avoid clicking those links just because they don’t want the webmasters to earn any money!
To solve this problem and to increase our affiliate links’ CTR, we can opt to mask our affiliate links so that they will look like “normal” links.
Here are some methods to mask your affiliate links:
Mask Affiliate Links through 301 Redirect
Steps:
1. Open your htaccess file and add the following “code” to it.
Redirect 301 /product http://youraffiliatelinkhere.tld?123
2. Done! It’s so simple, right? http://yourdomain.tld/product will redirect to your affiliate link. 
Mask Affiliate Links through PHP
Steps:
1. Create a PHP file (I recommend using product.php) and insert the code below. Be sure to replace “insert affiliate link here” with your affiliate link!
<?php
header( ‘Location: insert affiliate link here’ ) ;
?>
2. Create a folder in your domain and name it “special-offers” or something like that.
3. Upload the PHP file to your newly created folder.
4. Viola! You may now use http://yourdomain.tld/special-offers/product.php instead of http://youraffiliatelinkhere.tld?123.
Mask Affiliate Links through URL Redirection Sites
Steps:
1. Go to a URL redirection site link TinyURL.
2. Enter your affiliate link you will be given a shortened URL which will redirect to the link that you gave.
Here’s a list of URL redirection sites for your use. 
If you know of other methods, please feel free to share it with us by leaving a comment! Thanks a lot. 
i always wanted to hide my affiliate links, but did not knew it was so easy. though i have a question, am looking foreword to use this method: Redirect 301 /product http://youraffiliatelinkhere.tld?123
i have a lot of affiliate links in my blog, so i will add all the affiliate links in the htaccess file!
can you explain this step in more details, thanks!
site funda:
Basically, you just open your htaccess file, add this:
Redirect 301 /product http://youraffiliatelinkhere.tld?123
and then save/upload it. Don’t forget to change http://youraffiliatelinkhere.tld?123 to your affiliate link. That’s how easy it is!
This is a good post, but I would definitely recommend one very important thing. This is so important that if you don’t do it then you are just wasting your marketing efforts. This is if you are directly promoting your affiliate referral links in Adwords or on other sites, then you are doing the testing for your merchants. In other words, they will be able to see the quality of the traffic you are sending them in their stats and then they may decide to move on board and take your success away. It is like they would be using you to do the testing which will cost you and once they see results from something they will then move in and disallow you from doing that.
So sometimes masking your affiliate links are not the only thing you should do, maybe using a landing page or something with your link on or hiding the referrer url when you use the php header masking option.
Thanks Affiliate Seeking for that very detailed comment. Maybe I’ll post something about landing pages soon.