At some point, you will want to generate some money from your blog by promoting affilliate products.

When this happens, you’ll be given an affilliate link like this;
https://paydotcom.com/r/88429/JohnTanner/25533774/

Affiliate links can be used as part of an email campaign, be part of a forum signature, or be direcly mentioned within a blog post.

So you don’t want to put people off by displaying links that scream “I’m trying to sell something”.

First impressions count.

So take that an extra few minutes and create a more appealing url address that will hide the affilliate link.

 
To do this, think of a meaningful address that you’d like to display.

In this instance I want the url to follow the following naming format;

http://www.myblog.com/recommends/productXYZ

   
Start off by creating an empty folder on your P.C. called ‘recommends’ and within that folder, create another empty folder called ‘productXYZ’.

Open up Notepad and copy the following code into the editor.

 
<?php $URL=”https://paydotcom.com/r/88429/JohnTanner/25533774/“;
header (“Location: $URL”);
exit();
?>

Change the value of $URL to be the affilliate link address you want to cloak.
Save as “index.php”

(Note; If you save the file without quotes you will end up with index.php.txt)

 
Now you need to open up your FTP Editor and copy the Folder ‘recommends’ from your P.C. across to sit within the folder Public.html of your website.

   
The end result will be that you can use

http://www.myblog.com/recommends/productXYZ  (or what ever you decide),

as part of an email campaign, forum signature, or blog post, rather than the ugly affilliate link.

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