Posts Tagged ‘link cloaking’

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.

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