Cloak Affiliate Link with GoCode WordPress Plugin
I found a lot of references in the internet regarding affiliate link cloaking, for a few, using iFrame, using php header location to redirect user, or using a simple but effective way like TinyUrl services.
The first two are not scalable, each time we have new affiliate link, we need to create a new file to handle the URL redirection, yup, a boring and not effective work.
TinyUrl is a great service, especially after they add new feature that allowed us to create our own short Url, not just a random string like before, but the link will not look professional, because every body knew about TinyUrl and what its can do.
GoCode WordPress Plugin bring this affiliate link cloaking into a new era. Using GoCode we have our own TinyURL service within our blog, even more, we can track how many visitor had click our affiliate links, really help us to track which one is the most successful one, and why? This way, we can improve our way of placing and displaying our affiliate links for better click through rate.
Plugin installation is easy, download, upload to server, and activate. Place the following code in your .htaccess file, above the line that says “# BEGIN WordPress”:
RewriteEngine On RewriteRule ^go/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]*)/?$ /index.php?gocode=$1 [L,R]
Later on, we have new page called GoCode in our WordPress admin panel Manage, where we can manage our link directions.
To cloak our affiliate link, add new GoCode by filling the form with redirection key, our true affiliate link, and check box whether we want to track this link or not. The cloaked link will be look like this:
http://domain.tld/go/redirectionkey
neat and look professional.
PS: If you are using a non Apache web server, like Lighttpd that isn’t support .htaccess, then you need to consider another way to cloak your affiliate links.
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Poer July 10th, 2008 at 2:51 pm