If you read my blog last week, you’ll see that I chatted a bit about the new plugin I discovered thanks to my friend Wayne Lambert. The plugin is called Pretty Links and helps you to cloak links using your own domain name. Very cool.

Well, I have an update for you…

I was writing some articles recently for Ezine and other similar directories and realised that they wouldn’t accept these cloaked links, even though I’d made them pretty. Incidentally, when I say pretty, I don’t mean that I’ve covered them in flowers and patterns. I just mean that they now have look like this:

mydomainname.com/pretty-link

instead of like this:

bit.ly/random-collection-of-letters

So, although the plugin is awesome for blog and e-mail postings, it doesn’t work for article links. However, what does work very well is using domain names to cloak the links. Basically, you buy a domain name, then set it up to forward to your affiliate link. Whenever anyone clicks on it, it takes them straight to the affiliate promotion.

Now you may be thinking: ‘Yeah, but isn’t it more expensive to buy a domain name every time you want to cloak an affiliate link?’

Yes, of course it is, but there’s a very good ‘up side’ to doing it this way.

I’m currently using the domain name http://totaltrafficblueprint.com to promote an affiliate product via ClickBank. I’m writing articles to put on places like EzineArticle.com and other article directories. This means that this domain name is getting lots of backlinks as a result. It’s also getting approved for inclusion in my articles on the big sites as it doesn’t look anything like an affiliate link.

When I want to stop promoting this product and want to promote a different traffic product, all I need to do is change the domain forwarding entry to the new affiliate link. Immediately, all those links will then go to the new product.

Better still, when I want to release my own product under that name, I will simply use the domain name to set up a site. Again, the site will already have a load of backlinks due to my previous efforts. I’ve done the promotional work once, but I’m leveraging it over and over again. Cool, huh?

This is the way forward for doing big promotions. Do the work once, get paid multiple times. Genius.