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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