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In my previous article Hiding Affiliate links: advantages and disadvantages I was writing about pros and cons of hiding Affiliate links. It’s up to each and every online marketer whether hide affiliate links or not. Here I will tell you how actually you may hide, or mask your affiliate URL, if you decided to do so. There is many different techniques to hide links, here are the most commonly used:

.htaccess file
Your visitor will see a link to one of the files on your website, for ex.: http://www.yoursite.com/product.php and actually this link will forward him to your affiliate URL http://www.merchant.com/?affid=yourname. How can this be? Here’s how: In your www (which is public_html) directory should be file named ".htaccess". If there isn’t - create one. This file you need to edit and add folowing lines:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^product.php$ http://www.merchant.com/?affid=yourname [R]

Now as you go to http://www.yoursite.com/product.php you’ll get redirected to merchant’s website.
Please note that this does not work for IIS (Internet Information Server). If your website is on Windows Server, make sure your Web Server is Apache, as .htaccess files are not supported by IIS. You may use your web host control panel to set redirects like this under IIS Web Server.

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There is different opinions on subject. Some people believes that affiliate links has to be visible, to be honest that this link is actually makes some financial income to site owner. Some even states (aff.) after an affiliate link (aff. means affiliate link). Others are sure that showing affiliate links equal to loosing money. Yes, marketing work should be rewarded, but is it right to hide affiliate links? Here’s few points I have to share:

Advantages of hiding affiliate links:

• Bypassing th link. I have been writing about this in my "The value of affiliate links " article. The idea is that some of us, specially those involved in internet marketing would remove affiliate ID from the link and go directly to merchant’s website. So only merchant makes money, and this is really bad thing.
• Links Hijacking. There is opinion that some savvy guys may hijack your link. Then they would change your ID to their to get affiliate commissions. Continue reading »

Over the web we all met links to a website with affiliate code in it. Some of us notice this codes, some doesn’t, and some does remove them. Those, who removes affiliate refering part from link, don’t want to bear with the fact that someone will make some money on their click-thru. This is wrong. Let me explain why.

Mostly this happnds to website registrations, but it also often happends to web services and offline services. For example, let’s take a dating website. On some website you found great decription of dating site, it meets yours expectations of dating site, and you know you will go there and register. But, you see that link contains affiliate code. Here some of us are thinking close to this: “why someone will be making money just for refering me there? I found this site in Google, now I just click a link on it, and it’s owner will make some cash of it. I could find that dating site some other way!”. Usually after such thoughts, visitor copies a link, removes affiliate part and keeps only dating site domain name and goes there. This is tragedy. Why?
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