Affiliate sales are attributed because the affiliate link drops a cookie into the browser of the person who clicks the link. Most affiliate programs offer a transparent link that for people who are affiliate savvy can be “got around”.

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When you spend hours carefully working on a review this can be disappointing.

How often it happens is debated, probably rarely in non marketing niches but in the marketing niche it may be very high.

The cookie that earns you a commission is in the link. Some people who find your article may remove the cookie before clicking it and go to the site without it, and others may even change the cookie to their own cookie so they make a commission.

Also some urls are overlong and others are obviously affiliate links and this can also cause problems.

Plugin Link Cloaks Using A Redirect

The solution to this is to “cloak” the link with a redirect. This is easy enough to do for a normal site but for a CMS such as Wordpress in php, the normal solution creates conflicts and this is better handled using a plugin.

The Go code plugin is a link cloak plugin for Wordpress that is both basic and easy to use. It simply exchanges an affiliate url for an url that displays your domain name, the word /go/ and a chosen word to describe the product. It can also be used for overlong “normal” url redirects where you want your urls “branded” with your own site name.

For example my normal affiliate url for the Wordpress affiliate plugin is transformed by the Wordpress link cloak plugin and becomes

http://www.richnicheblogging.com/monetize/go/wp-cb-plugin/

As you can see, my site name is long and my site blog is in a subfolder (monetize) , so this doesn’t gain me much benefit for shortening an url!

But if your blog is in the site root it will.

The wordpress link cloak plugin has hidden the destination site url so people must click it to discover the site it goes to and at no time is my “cookie” visible so people can change it.

Simple and effective link cloaking for Wordpress blogs.

The link cloak plugin is free and you can get it from the Wordpress Plugin Directory, with installation and troubleshooting info,  at

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gocodes/

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