Some days ago, I noticed someone linked one of my posts related to an affiliate program and checking the statistics, I saw that many people left my blog through the affiliate link, something good for me. Yesterday, I was checking that affiliate panel to verify how many people joined to my network, but I couldn’t find those affiliates… what happened here?
Loosing Your Referrals
Many people when you invite them to a network through your referral link, delete your referral code to give you nothing of their sales. Here is how it works:
Step 1 - Copy Link Location
Step 2 – Paste the link in the bar and select the affiliate code
Step 3 – Delete the referral code and load the page
So, if you load https://users.marketleverage.com/ you will be redirected to http://www.marketleverage.com/ . After then, the people will join to the program by “themselves” and you won’t get any commission for that.
This is a really bad problem because you are losing money, you could be earning a lot of commissions from the people who didn’t join with the referral link you gave them. And this problem is not only on affiliate programs, there is another services like Plurk which you can join with a referral link, giving some karma points to the person who invited you.
Of course, not everybody do this for bad. Sometimes the people are reading a post very quick because they need to go or something like, and when someone invite them to a network they don’t click the link, instead they memorize or take a note of the network’s name. Then when they have time, they search on google for this network to know more about it, joining to it without a referral link.
How To Solve This Problem
Some time ago, I noticed many bloggers sharing their referral codes in a different way, I thought it was a plugin or something like that… May be you have seen this before, something like theblog.com/out/marketleverage.php for example. Well, this is called Link Masking, and you can do that to protect your affiliate links.
When someone click on that link, it will be redirected to your referral link, avoiding the steps explained above. But the question is… How do I make that php file? Well honestly, it can be a html or htm file because the little code don’t use any special php function, but it’s more common to use that extension because wordpress is written in that language…
However, you need to follow the next steps to create that file:
Step 1 – Open a new text file and copy this:
<html> <body> <p align="center">You are being taken to the correct page.
<head>
<title>Your-Referral-Tittle-Here</title>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
<script> window.location="your-referral-link-here"; </script>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="1; url=your-referral-link-here">
</head>
<br>If the page doesn't load after 5 seconds, <a href="your-referral-link-here">click here</a>.</p>
</body>
</html>
Step 2 – Save that file as thenetwork.php, i.e. marketleverage.php.
Step 3 – Use an FTP program ( I use filezilla ) to create a folder into the main directory, you can call it out, links, go or whatever you want. I called it go.
Step 4 – Upload the .php file to the created directory.
So then, you need to create a file for each referral code you want to share. This way, you will protect all your referral links and you won’t lose anything in a future.
Enjoy protecting your affiliate links!
Hey! my name is Javier but you can call me Javo, everybody does.
hmm…I can’t use this trick since I’m using blogspot, right
or no? sorry..I’m so illiterate about this 
Oris last blog post..Kite Runner: There’s a way to be good again
Nice tutorial on masking affiliate links so that you won’t lose referral and affiliate commissions. I am sure you will help other affiliate marketers with this post.
Hey Ori, I think you can’t do this. As I remember, blogspot don’t let you access to the root directory, sorry!
Nice tutorial. For those of you using WordPress, there is a plug in, redirection, that will allow you to do this without having to create a file (and it will keep stats for you). I posted about this redirection plug-in for a different reason.
For those using blogspot, if you have a domain running somewhere on a shared host, you can always set up the redirection page there. If you don’t have that option, you may be able to use a tinyurl option.
You can use the Gocodes plugin. It is easier because you don’t have to change the html file as you described above. Instead you just change the link in your admin panel.
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May I suggest a faster solution?
Go to d95.com and enter your affiliate link. Then enter the keyword you’d like to have within the short URL and choose mask URL.
What you’ll have is a shorter URL and it’ll keep masked even if a person clicks it and navigates through the pages.
Of course you need to be fast before someone else reserved your keyword
Hey nice ideas, I knew it was a plugin for this!
Thanks for sharing all these resources.
Nice tips, but it quite take some time i think
Well i have a programs that can make your affiliate link masked just visit my store in few days
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The above process seems long. Why not just create a “out” folder in the public_html folder and put in a .htaccess file in it with all the referral links?
That would be easy.
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May be the best solution is to use the Gocodes plugin.
There is also Link a dink, Link Cloaking Plugin and my favourite: alinks
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