Brewsterware

October 6, 2007

affiliate link cloaker

Filed under: Internet,Marketing — Joe Brewer @ 6:17 pm


All affiliate marketers know the problem of commission theft – that is people altering the your url so that you don’t receive your commission from any sales. There are two kinds of theft – the thief can replace the affiliate id from a link with their own or remove it completely. Either way you lose out.This software allows affiliate marketers to cloak their affiliate links using either Mambo or Joomla! CMS to stop people from taking the commission themselves. Not only does this mambot turn the target url into unreadable rubbish like this:

h t t p : / / w w w . h y p n o s i s d o w n l o a d s . c o m ? 5 0 9

It also generates javascript so that the status bar doesn’t display the target url.

How to use:

1. Install the mambot in the usual way.

2. In the link that you want to cloak put the word affiliate. For example, with this link:

<a href=”http://www.netprofitstoday.com/cbae/?a=GmPNICPmNz”>Rosalind Gardners Super Affiliate Handbook</a>

change it to:

<a affiliate href=”http://www.netprofitstoday.com/cbae/?a=GmPNICPmNz”>Rosalind Gardners Super Affiliate Handbook</a>

or if you are using a WYSIWYG editor, change it to:

{mos_afflink href=”http://www.netprofitstoday.com/cbae/?a=GmPNICPmNz”}Rosalind Gardners Super Affiliate Handbook{/mos_afflink}

That’s all there is to it! It couldn’t be simpler.

If you want to make the text in the status bar change when the user puts their mouse over the link, use the “statustext” tag in the link. For example:

<a affiliate statustext=”Rosalind Gardners Super Affiliate Handbook” href=”http://www.netprofitstoday.com/cbae/?a=GmPNICPmNz”>Rosalind Gardners Super Affiliate Handbook</a>

or if you are using a WYSIWYG editor:

{mos_afflink statustext=”Rosalind Gardners Super Affiliate Handbook” href=”http://www.netprofitstoday.com/cbae/?a=GmPNICPmNz”}Rosalind Gardners Super Affiliate Handbook{/mos_afflink}

The Joomla! Mambot will then take care of the rest.

If you don’t run Joomla!, this product does an excellent job of creating cloaked links for your affiliate site: Affiliate Link Cloaker.

Incidentally, if you haven’t got Rosalind Gardeners excellent guide on affiliate marketing if definitely worth a read. Even though it is full of affiliate links, the products that she recommends are high quality, it is full of good advice, and she offers excellent after sales support. Her book starts from the very basics – from how to setup a website, to choosing the subjects to use and selecting the right companies to affiliate with. Buy her ebook here.

Download the new Joomla version (version 2) of my affiliate link cloaker mambot here. This version should work with all WYSIWYG editors.

6 Comments

  1. why is the version 2 of the affiliate link clocker not found on joomla.or

    Comment by steve pershall — March 31, 2008 @ 9:52 pm

  2. Nice. Just what I needed. 🙂

    Comment by celius — June 21, 2008 @ 5:06 pm

  3. Dosn’t work very well in J1.5 though. Would be nice to see a new version of this one. With buttons to the wysiwyg. 🙂

    Comment by celius — June 21, 2008 @ 5:20 pm

  4. The idea is very good and useful. Unfortunately this doesn’t work for me.I would like to change the address of the affiliate link in the status bar as well commented in this page, and the link still the same. Im using WYSIYG and Joomla 1.0.15, of course I have include the tag strt with {mos_afflink..

    Comment by patrick — August 18, 2008 @ 7:18 am

  5. It does not work for me too, can you explain more detail info? This is very useful extension!

    Comment by Van — August 24, 2008 @ 1:39 pm

  6. I’ve rewritten this for Joomla 1.5 now.

    You can download and read the instructions for use here: http://www.brewsterware.com/archives/joomla-affiliate-link-cloaker.html

    Comment by Joe Brewer — October 20, 2008 @ 7:26 am

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