Do you hide your affiliated links?
Imagine you walk into a apparel store. There is a friendly sales person that comes over to promote the new T-shirts that arrived recently. He talk about the unique design of the print, the 100% combed cotton material and the new designers cutting of the shirt. You were so impressed that you start to tell the sales person to wrap it up. Being the nice person he is, he told you about the 20% commission that he will earn when you buy the t-shirt from him. That’s when you say, “No, I am not buying this t-shirt if you are earning a commission from it”.
Do you find the above story familiar?
You search for reviews for the best and cheapest webhosting service around. You found a article that tells you the features of a good webhost. You like it and decided to buy the plan. Suddenly, you look in the status bar of your browser and saw that it is a affiliated link. You start to get disgusted and copy the link (without the affiliated referral) so that you can buy directly from the store. Imagine if the link is just a straight link to the site, you would have click through to sign up.
Both stories above shows that irrationality of a normal person. All commissions are paid by the source and no matter who you buy from, the price you pay are the same. So why do you penalize the marketer/promoter? Doing so just unhinge all the hard work promoting to you/ researching for the review you read. You might say the promoter is biased towards their product, but if the product is really bad, you think you can’t see through the sugar coated lies?
So if you are a affiliated marketer and wanted to “camouflage” your affiliated links, here are 4 ways to do it.
- This is from Ben Cook of BloggingExperiment. He uses a affilated jump page to redirect the buyer to the source. So a url like this “http://www.text-link-ads.com/starter_kit.php?ref=94747” would become this http://blogmunch.com/recommend/text-link-ads.php. Here’s the code for your php template.
<html>
<head>
<insert tracking scripts here>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Language” content=”en-us”>
<title>Sign Up with Text Link Ads</title>
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow”>
<script>window.location=”affiliate url“;</script>
<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”1; url=”affiliate url“>
</head>
<body>
<p align=”center”>You will be taken to the correct page shortly.
<br>If this page does not load after 5 seconds, please
<a href=”affiliate url“>click here</a>.</p>
</body>
</html> - If you are using cPanel with your webhost, you can also use the redirect function at the domain tab to redirect any affiliated links to your custom url.
- You can also use a tool like http://get-shorty.com/ to install on your server to generate short and sweet url that will hide your affiliated links.
- Lastly, like all things WordPress, your solution is only a plugin away. Use the Hidden Affiliate Links plugin.
Choose any one of the solutions above and enjoy more click-through to your affiliated programs.
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November 2nd, 2007 at 11:38 pm
[...] Do you hide your affiliated links? [...]
December 11th, 2007 at 11:31 am
You can also use a server side script written in PHP or Perl that will do this. For example, to make a folder on your website redirect somewhere else, you could put a file called “index.php” in that folder which contains the following:
<?php
header(”Location: http://url-to-redirect-to“)
?>
December 11th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
I think I have read about it somewhere. Thanks anyway.
March 4th, 2008 at 10:51 pm
Thank u very muche for your information!
March 5th, 2008 at 1:25 pm
I think it’s a bad idea to use Text-Link-Ads, especially when you’re putting it way out in the open. Sites using/displaying links from their sites & client list are all over Google’s radar.
Be careful!
May 3rd, 2008 at 5:15 am
The problem is, as a shopper, I usually want to know which sites have affiliate links as which dont, simply because a “reviews” type website is untrustable. I dont mind them making money, but it seems biased, especially in the online world. The exception if it is a high trust website. A website that has a few affiliate links, but a good reputation, and mostly good content.
May 3rd, 2008 at 5:32 am
I really am bothered by pure affiliate sites taht are trying to recommend products because so often they promote only the highest converting/ popular programs. In that case I would want to know that they are affilaite links. If its a site I trust and only has a few affiliate links, I wouldn’t care either way. I think its fine for people to make money, besides the average visitor isn’t going to have a clue.