After an affiliate marketer chooses a product to promote, he is given a unique website link called an “affiliate link”. In this link, the unique identity of an affiliate marketer is attached. The affiliate marketer is required to promote this affiliate link as much as he can. For this purpose websites, forums, blogs, newsletters and many other ways are used. Whenever a visitor clicks on an affiliate link to go to the merchant’s website and make a purchase, the affiliate is credited.

Usually the affiliate link is in this form:

http://www.anymerchantwebsite.com?aff_id=someidlike123

In this URL there are two parts:

1) http://www.anymerchantwebsite.com – the link to the merchant website.

2) aff_id = someidlike123 – the unique affiliate id of the affiliate marketer.

You can see in the above example that it is really very easy to remove the trailing affiliate id from the affiliate link. Anyone can remove your affiliate id and visit the merchant website to purchase. When this happens, you lose the commission that was rightfully yours. This is a problem for the affiliate marketer.

Fear not, though. There are solutions for this issue. If you are using your own hosting, try this:

Using your file manager, make a new HTML file. Name this file relevant to the product you are promoting.

Example: http://www.themoneybiz.com/hiding-your-affiliate-link/

Save your file with an HTML extension. Now when someone types your personalized web address, the code in the HTML file will show them your affiliate link in such a way that they will not be able to edit it. They will not know that the link they are clicking is an affiliate link.

Another way to hide your affiliate link is to “cloak” it. There are plenty of websites that will do this for you. My personal favorite is OffTo. This site allows you to enter your affiliate link, cloak it and hide the referral id.

Take heed, my friends. Protect your affiliate links. You have worked to hard to lose them.