How To: Hiding Your Affiliate Links using WordPress

With the increasing popularity of using affiliate links to generate income online, it can significantly improve your conversion rate on affiliate sign-ups by disguising your affiliate links using a URL with your domain name, then redirecting them to the appropriate affiliate. 

The idea behind using this theory is that readers will click on it thinking it is an internal link on your site, rather than taking you to a third party site.  Another benefit is that all of your blog’s links point toward an internal address on your domain, giving you control to update the URL easily. This helps avoid dead links whenever a company changes a URL and makes it easy to update your affiliate links when the need arises.

Redirects can be accomplished in a variety of ways, but as this blog focuses on self-hosted WordPress, I will be going over an easy way to do this using a PHP redirect.  Here are the steps I took when I hid my affiliate links for this website:

1. Create a folder called “Go.”
2. Create a .php document (this can easily be done with Notepad or any similar program) and name it after the appropriate affiliate link you are using.
3. Now paste the following code into the document: <? header("Location: http://youraffiliatelinkurlhere"); ?>
4. Save it into the “Go” folder created above.
5. Repeat steps 2-4 until you’ve created a .php file for each affiliate link.
6. Go to your FTP and upload your “Go” folder directly to the public_html folder.
7. Update all your affiliate links to point towards your new redirect!

Your redirect will look something like http://www.yourdomainname.com/go/phpdocumentname.php.

You can name the documents whatever you want, or you can use a different name than “Go” for your folder name.   The important thing is that you remember what you named it so that you can use your new affiliate link!