If the person you are sending the email to only receives as plain text, hiding or cloaking affiliate links in emails you send is a little bit harder than if they can receive html formatted emails. The good new is that most people these days can receive emails in HTML format.
If the recipient of your email receives emails as plain text, without HTML formatting, your affiliate link cloaking will be limited to some sort of short url service. When the person clicks on the url, they will be forwarded to your affiliate link.
Whether or not the email recipient knows that the link is an affiliate link is going to depend upon ...
Probably the best way to avoid detection as much as possible, is to have your own custom domain name that forwards the links they click, in the emails you send, to your affiliate link. How practical this is depends upon how many different types of affiliate links you want to put in your emails.
If you are mostly promoting one or two products, purchase a domain name that is as similar as possible to the url the recipient of your email will be directed to, when they click on the link in your email to them.
If you are promoting many different products, you could always purchase a custom domain name for each different product. At one time I had hundreds of different domain names to market affiliate products, so this is do-able depending upon how committed you are to making serious money as an affiliate marketer.
For example let's say you are an affiliate for Match.com dating. If your affiliate link directs them to a page at the Match dating site you could purchase and use a domain name like ...
... and there is a better chance that the recipient of your email won't know the affiliate link you put in the email is an affiliate link.
Most web servers and domain name providers offer a basic url redirection option that makes it easy to seamlessly redirect the link in your email, which is your domain name, to your affiliate link. You could also employ simple php redirect or htaccess redirect to your affiliate link.
Simple PHP affiliate link redirection is as simple as ...
http://www.example.com/ to the url of your affiliate link.index.php.When someone clicks the link in your email, the below code will immediately redirect them to your affiliate url, with the email recipient probably being none-the-wiser.
With HTML formatted emails, you have a bit more power and flexibility when it comes to cloaking affiliate links in your emails. Assuming you can access and edit the html code itself (depending upon your email client) you can create links in the emails that have the href attribute that goes directly to the website without an affiliate link.
You then go into the HTML source of the email and insert a bit of Javascript code into the link to make the affiliate link hiding magic happen. You are only limited by your imagination and your knowledge of Javascript but even if you don't know Javascript at all, you can simply use the code below.
http://www.youraffiliatelink.com with your actual affiliate link.http://www.nonaffiliateurltowebsite.com with the direct link to the website that is not an affiliate link.Of course this simple method of hiding your affiliate links is not limited to just emails, but can be applied to your web pages as well. It is simple, short and direct and it works.
The tiny piece of Javascript: onmousedown="this.href=this.className;" simply swaps the href of the link (which is the direct, non affiliate link to the website) with the class of the link (which is your affiliate link). Pretty sneaky right?
The only possible oops to this email affiliate link hiding trick is will the email recipients email client warn them of this? I am providing you with many different options for hiding your affiliate links in your emails. It's up to you to experiment and play and see which one is right for you.
You could use a technique called cookie dropping. The way this works is you insert a 1 pixel wide by 1 pixel high image in the email with the src of the image being your affiliate link. What happens is the email client of the person reading your email will attempt to load the image. Because the src of the image does not actually point to a real image but is your affiliate link, it will cause an affiliate cookie to be dropped on the email recipients computer.
When they make a purchase from the affiliate website, you will get commission for the sale because the affiliate website will detect the cookie on their computer and you will get commission for the sale.
Here is the code to use for the image for this cookie dropping method. The only thing you want to change is the src, http://www.youraffiliatelink.com, for the image. You want to change that to your affiliate link.
The only hiccups with this email affiliate link hiding method ...
Another option, instead of having the full email contents in the email itself, your email could be a teaser which contains the first couple of sentences of the email followed by a link they click to read the rest of the email. That link could lead to a page on your website. Make that page look just like an email, and you can have your affiliate links within that web page.
To ensure the highest possible click through rate on the link in your email ...
http://www.yourwebsite.com/email/continue-2398u232394.htm. For this technique of cloaking affiliate links in your emails, you might want to consider purchasing a domain name that sounds like an email service like http://secure-emails.com or something along that line.More or Continue Reading.Another approach is instead of hiding the affiliate links in your emails, draw attention to them - use the honest approach.
Be up front in your emails and tell the reader of the email that when they click the link, you are going to make a commission. Offer them a second, direct link where you won't make a commission and an affiliate link and ask them to click the affiliate link because it helps pay the bills so you devote your time to helping people like the reader of your email.
Of course you could be extra sneaky and make the second, non affiliate link an affiliate link that is hidden using one of these techniques so whichever one they click on you still make your affiliate commissions.
You would be surprised how effective this awe-shucks, Ron Howard approach to email marketing can be and how many people will actually click the affiliate link so you can make a sales commission. You have to remember, there are so many ways the internet employs deception and dishonesty, and there are so many a**holes on the web, that this honest approach in your emails will be appreciated by, and touch the hearts of many.
For inserting Amazon.com affiliate links in your emails, I would use the approach of purchasing a domain name that looks like a short url service for Amazon and then use PHP redirection for the different Amazon affiliate links. You are going to have to get creative here and try different options to find a domain name that is available that look like a legit Amazon short url service, but, for example:
Go to namecheap.com or name.com and enter different variations and namecheap will show you what is available. When you find an available domain name that looks a lot like a legit url shortening service for Amazon, get it.
If you don't mind us making an affiliate commission, then click this link to purchase a namecheap domain name - ha ha, wait! you know this trick already.
Cloaking affiliate links within emails takes an extra bit of creativity but can be done if you are committed. The most important advice I can give you is have the mindset of REALLY wanting to help people and not just take their money, and that tone of integrity will be conveyed in your emails and lead to greater affiliate sales success.
Think of how cool you will look to your friends when they see all the new cool email affiliate link hiding tricks you know ;). The most important thing here is to have fun and approach the concept of hiding your affiliate links in emails with a sense of excitement and curiosity. If you are not having fun, what is the point?
