Marketing Defined

How To Mask Affiliate Links Meta Tag HTML Code

Updated:  Sep 2008

A short URL is not only easy to remember , but is SEO “friendly”. Likewise click-through-rates for Affiliate sales are considerably improved with the perceived credibility when your domain name is contained in the hyperlink.

Sadly you also encounter visitors to your website who upon seeing your affiliate link will replace it with their own affiliate ID.

A prospective customer is far likelier to click through to a referral for an Affiliate program named “Best Adword Tips” for example, if the URL was www.yourdomain.com/bat rather than the lengthy and search engine unfriendly www.bestadwordtips/affiliate/?576320

Start by referring to the post on how to Make Affiliate Income Without A Website for a credible “zero dollar web host” without annoying banner ads, but preferably start with a professional web host from the word go.

Once you have signed up for a free or “paid” website, the next step is to create a redirect page for your Affiliate program.

How To Create a Redirect Page to an Affiliate Page Using Your Domain Name

Open a blank page in Notepad into which you will insert the following HTML code and save the page as a web page.  For example for our imaginary Affiliate program “Best Adword Tips”, you could save the page as bat.htm - Choose a logical extension to match your Affiliate program.

(html)
(head)
(meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0; URL=http://affiliate-
program.com/your-ID”)
(/head)
(body)
(/body)
(/html)

Be sure to replace ALL the brackets above with the the correct <> brackets used in HTML.

You will then upload via FTP the “bat.htm” page to your Domain’s “public.html” folder. That’s it!

When the URL  http://www.yourdomain.com/bat.htm is used in Classified Ads and Google Adword campaigns, customers who click on the link are automatically redirected to the destination website http://affiliate-program.com/your-ID.

And you earn the commission on that referral when they buy.

NOTE: Albert Einstein once said: “Nothing happens until something Moves” - AND - progression online like any other business is a constant learning process.   Please just do it.. go put up that first website now,  today!  It might not be perfect, but that’s where we all started.  It only gets better.