There is no doubt that if you are interested in using your blog to make money online, it is important that you take advantage of the income potential that is available through the use of affiliate links. You can generate additional income in a variety of ways depending on the service, ranging from set payments for each qualified referral, to making a percentage of any referrals income for an established period of time.

There are many different theories covering the most optimal ways to display your affiliate links, but the most common ones involve a variety of methods for hiding your affiliate links. The idea behind using this theory is that readers will click on it thinking it is an internal link on your site, rather than taking you to a third party site. But, as we found out yesterday, there is an additional benefit! When all your website’s links point toward an internal address on your domain, you can control and update the URL easily. This helps avoid dead links whenever a company changes a URL and makes it easy to update your affiliate links when the need arises.

As for setting this up, it is actually pretty easy if you have a self-hosted WordPress blog. Here are the steps I took when I hid my affiliate links for this website:

  1. Create a folder called “Go.”
  2. Create a .php document (this can easily be done with Notepad) and name it after the appropriate affiliate link you are using. Now paste the following code into the document: <? header("Location: http://youraffiliatelinkurlhere"); ?>
  3. FTP GoSave it into the “Go” folder created above.
  4. Repeat steps 2-3 until you’ve created a .php file for each affiliate link.
  5. Go to your FTP and upload your “Go” folder directly to the public_html folder.
  6. Update all your affiliate links to point towards your new redirect!

Your redirect will look something like http://www.yourdomainname.com/go/phpdocumentname.php.

There are other ways to do this, such as not using PHP or altering your .htaccess file, but this is how I created mine. Any questions? Feel free to post them below!