Niche Marketing Explained

"connecting you to the web's best niche market resources" ... "to inform and prosper your niche business"

How to mask (those awful) affiliate links

Masking your affiliate links is the CLEVER thing to do. Here's why...

The main advantage is that you can prevent people chopping off your affiliate ID. You've done the work to bring them to the site. So if they buy, you want the affiliate commission.

Also, you can prevent the "I've seen that before" reaction. Okay, maybe they have seen it before... but the timing wasnt right for them back then.

Or maybe they havent seen it before ... what they saw was something else.

Or maybe the affiliate site has improved recently. Or their needs have changed. Or their financial position...

In any event, you'd like them to see your affiliate site rather than click away. And you certainly dont want them to chop off your affiliate ID so they can pocket the commission.

So link-masking is a useful strategy that can improve your results. And there are several different ways to do it.

1. Create a sub-domain

One approach is to create a subdomain. Your web host will tell you whether it's possible at your site (and can show you how).

For example:
If the *real* affiliate URL is "http://www.BigCompany.com?affiliateid=12345", you can make a link to "http://bc.yourdomain.com" (where "bc" is the subdomain you've created for Big Company). Of course, you can call it whatever you want... call it "Gary" if you like.

You then use a "Meta refresh" to transport the visitor from the subdomain to the *real* affiliate URL. Here's how...

2. Use meta-refresh code

An easier way is to create a simple html page that redirects visitors to the *real* affiliate URL. Since you probably want to promote your ClickBank affiliate link (get yours here) for Niche Marketing Explained, let's just use that as our example. There are just 2 steps.

Step 1. Create a new webpage with the following code in it. Exactly this code. (Okay, I give in. You got me! You do have to change the title and the nickname.)

Important: Remove all the asterisks (*) here (and in the 2 boxes below) ... I've added them so that the code gets displayed here instead of working here, but you want your code to work!

This tiny fragment of code is all that you put in the page. Nothing else. I could mention that you need to insert your nickname where it says NICKNAME but you already know that, so I wont say another word about it...

Step 2. Save this code as "niche.html" or "nichemarketing.html" or whatever name you feel is meaningful. Upload it to your server, and that's it.

This page (http://www.yourdomain.com/niche.html) is the one you advertise. This link (http://yourdomain.com/niche.html) is the link that people click on. And when they do, they are automatically redirected to the destination website with your ClickBank affiliate link embedded in their URL. And you get the credit if they buy.

By way of explanation, the code in step 1 instructs the browser to refresh itself after zero seconds and to redirect the incoming request to the URL that is named next. So in zero seconds, your visitor's browser is being prepared to show your ClickBank affiliate link (the one in blue) for the Niche Marketing Explained ebook. Neat, eh?

This approach works well for email, discussion boards and websites. But for links on a website, another method will also work. You can simply change the way the URL appears in the browser's status bar (which is the horizontal strip at the bottom left corner of your screen). Here's how that's done...

3. Create a mouseOver effect

When your mouse hovers over a clickable link, you can look down to the status bar and read the URL of the link that your mouse is sitting on, right? OK, if you want to change the way the link appears, you can use a simple piece of "MouseOver" JavaScript code. Here it is...

(Just in case you're wondering about all those ' signs after the expression window.status=, we've got two single quotes followed by one double quote. The window.status is blank after the mouse moves away so there's nothing between the single quote marks.)

Where the lines of code stop and start doesnt matter in html because web browsers ignore hard carriage returns (you press "Enter" for a hard carriage return).

Here's a typical example...

(You'll notice that the text that appears in the status bar is placed inside *single* quotes. The pair of empty single quotes for the "onMouseOut" instruction causes the status bar to have no message when the mouse moves off the link.)

Now, when someone hovers their mouse over your link, instead of seeing your real affiliate link in their status bar, they'll see whatever you want them to see, which could be the website's main URL without your affiliate code.

Now it's your turn...

While I cant undertake to answer emails on this, I can show you where to get other helpful tutorials. Shelley Lowery provides this and that. Boogie Jack has a longer this but no "that". Enjoy yourself.