How to Hide Your Affiliate Links

• Why hide?
  Some people believes that affiliate links have to be visible, to be honest that this link is actually makes some financial income to site owner. Others are sure that showing affiliate links equal to loosing money because lots of people do not want to join under you. Marketing work should be rewarded. Why not? Here are some advantages of hiding your affiliate links:
  
• Bypassing the link. lots of us would remove affiliate ID from the link and go directly to merchant’s website to get the products he/she wants . So only merchant makes money, and this is really bad thing. Why? Site owner has paid domain, hosting fee, … to run his site. Why we do not do him a favour by click-though his referral links ?
• Visual look. Hidden link is much more beautiful and shorter (for example, http://your-site.com/url) than affiliate link (for example, http://merchant.com/product.php?affiliateID=ThemeLib).
  How to hide
  Here are 2 easy techniques you can use to hide your affiliate links :
  
  Online services
  Their are lots of website services which can create a new url to hide your referral link. Simply go to these websites and submit your affiliate link to get a short one.
  
  Some of them are :
• Shorturl
• Tinyurl
• Your new URL
  Advantages :
  - Easy to use, take about 10 seconds to get thing done
  
  Disadvantage :
  - Not meaningful to the product you refer, for example, the link http://tinyurl.com/5emvv3 will redirect you to http://revolutiontheme.com
  - Can not manage your links
  
  Hint :
  - Some services allow us to customize the url will be created. You should choose a meaningful name, but I think beautiful urls will run out soon.
  
  .htaccess 301 redirect
  Create a .htaccess file if you do not have one then add this code to the file.
  
  Redirect 301 /product http://merchant.com/product.php?affiliateID=ThemeLib
  
  Advantages :
  - Manage your links easily
  - Meaningful links, for example, http://your-site.com/revolution will redirect you to http://revolutiontheme.com
  
  Disadvantage :
  - More complicated
  - Must own a domain
  
  Hint :
  - You should use links with ‘go’ or ‘redirect’ to inform user that this link will redirect to another site, for example, http://your-site.com/go/revolution is better than http://your-site.com/revolution
  Although there are another techniques can be used such as PHP script, HTML code, Javascript, … but I found two methods above are the best. They’re easy to use for most Blogger and Wordpress users.
  If you know another easy techniques, please let me know by post a comment on this post. Thank you.