How To Cloak Affiliate Links In WordPress

Most of us are affiliates and making money through affiliate marketing. Last day, one of our users asked that how we using custom affiliate URLs in our blog. Well, that’s by using a plugin called ThirstyAffiliates. in this post, we are going to show you that how can you cloak affiliate links in WordPress using the ThirstyAffiliates plugin.

Why You Need An Affiliate Plugin?

Most affiliate URLs will look pretty ugly. Something like www.abc.com/product/ref=blah-blah-blah/. This is not easy to remember and most users are using URL shorteners like Bit.ly and Goo.gl for shortening it. If you are on WordPress, you don’t need to use any URL shorteners to cloak links.

By using a dedicated link clocking WordPress plugin, you will be able to manage all your affiliate links just inside your dashboard.

Is ThirstyAffiliates Free?

ThirstyAffiliates is a freemium plugin. For this tutorial, we are going to use the free version plugin. Most of our users are beginners and they don’t need extra expenses. We recommend you the free version for your blog.

If you run a pretty huge blog or an authority site, you must consider the premium version.

How To Cloak Affiliate Links In WordPress

First of all, you need to log in to your WordPress admin area and go to add new plugins section. There, you need to install the ThirstyAffiliates plugin.

Once you got installed the plugin, you need to activate it.

After that, you can see the plugin settings in the left sidebar. Go there.

Since we don’t have any affiliate link configured. Before adding one, we need to edit some plugin settings. Go to link appearance under plugin settings.

From there, you will be able to configure your link prefix. In our case, we are using a custom prefix /refer/ for our affiliate links.

Choose the redirection type. In our case, we are using 301 for affiliate links. You can choose one which you need.

You must add nofollow to your affiliate links. So, search engines like Google, Bing, and Yandex won’t follow your affiliate links.

Also, always open affiliate links in a new tab. By doing this, you will be able to keep your visitors on your website and open the affiliate website on a new tab.

Save the changes. Now, go to your affiliates links dashboard and click on add new affiliate link button.

Enter your link name and affiliate link. In my case, I am going to add my CSSIgniter affiliate link.

organize a category for the link.

Most affiliate networks like ShareASale, they will give you banner images. If you have any affiliate banner, you can use it on the link. Simply upload and insert the image. Once you got configured all, publish the link.

You can see that the plugin is simply created a redirection for you.

You can visit the link and it will redirect to the affiliate URL.

Affiliate Links Showing 404 Error!

if your affiliate URLs are showing a 404 page, you might want to save your permalinks again.

Then it will be fixed. You don’t want to update anything on the page. Just click on the save changes button. It will regenerate a fresh copy of the .htaccess file. That’s it!

Conclusion

This is how you can cloak affiliate links in WordPress.

We hope you found this tutorial helpful and earned something new. If you did, also consider sharing this post with your friends and fellow bloggers on social media. For more related posts, you may want to check out our blog section.

If you are using display ads like Media.net for monetizing your blog, don’t forget to check out our list of best ad management plugins.