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Within the Internet Marketing world you will probably hear that you will have to cloak your affiliate links. Why? This will stop commission theft and help you earn more money. And there are multiple affiliate cloakers out there - example, Mike Filsaime sells his great program for 97$! Is it really necessary to spend 97$ on a ‘url hider’?

From my experience you can easily find free programs that will do the job for you, some simple, and others more complex. These programs to provide stats and can be easily updated. Well, so can the free ones. I personally created my own via SQL - though it does not have a great interface (matter of fact no interface at all), everything is done via SQL. But it works - its quick and its free.

Some reasons why you want to think about cloaking your links:

1. Hides the UGLY Long URL
2. Changing links in the future is very simple, no need to adjust multiple pages
3. Links do not look like affiliate links
4. Safely keep your commissions

Here are some FREE alternatives to the paid cloakers you might see around:

1. ThatWise: Online Link Cloaker
2. How to Effectively Cloak your Affiliate Links - Article
3. Cloak Your Links - Video Tutorial

As you can see, simply typing into Google: cloak affiliate links will bring you an array of useful results, most of which are free to help you cloak your links. I do not know why a person would want spend $97 on a software when the resources are out there in the World Wide Web already, other than perceived convenience.

To further illustrate the point, after a little research, here are a few types of redirection / cloaking:

1. Affiliate Link Cloaking through HTTP Meta Refresh Tag

You have to create new html file within the empty BODY section, add the affiliate link in the HEAD section between meta refresh tags and finally replace the affiliate link in the original page with clear internal link, pointing at the new HTML file.

2. Affiliate Link Cloaking through PHP redirecting script

The theory is absolutely the same, but the PHP script is much faster and the resulting file is smaller then the previous example. It’s a PHP redirect which directs the hidden link to your affiliate’s sales page.

3. Affiliate Link Cloaking through HTACCESS file redirection

This is my preferred method – it is adding of just one line of code in your .htaccess file. Create a properly named directory. Put a file called .htaccess by creating it using a text editor, this file should contain the Redirect command, the location of the directory you want redirected relative to the root of your site and the full URL of the location you want that request sent to. This form of redirects should be meant for advance users.

Cloaking is really not necessary unless you are competing against similar users or target audiences. Internet Marketers selling to Internet marketers - then I would suggests using a cloaker. To the standard target audience, they will just see it as a link and nothing else. Outside the niche of Internet Marketing, readers do not care about a link and how it looks, as long as it directs users to a related sales page. Maybe that’s one thing a lot of people overlook sometimes?