Now I don’t want to suggest that the premium plugin is not a good product. On the contrary they are often great products. I just don’t see the sense in paying for something when, with a little creative effort you can accomplish the exact same result, with the same amount of effort, and spend no money.

SEO Smart Links + Redirection = Cloaking + Click Stats

One of the challenges of affiliate marketers is to make sure they are not being cheated out of commission payments by people stripping the affiliate ID from your affiliate URL. The other big challenge is getting accurate statistics about your ads and offers.

This guide will show you how to get creative with your plugins, to do more than was ever intended with them, and save money along the way.

WordPress Plugins That Help Affiliates

SEO Smart Links is a WordPress plugin that takes any keyword or phrase and automatically converts it to a link. It was originally designed to provide a simple method to deep link to posts and pages within your own site. Using any word or phrase you can automatically create a link and point to a related post or page on your blog.

This all happens without the need to write out that url every time the keyword appears in a post. However SEO Smart Links can also be used to create dynamic links in your posts that point to your affiliate offers, using your own unique affiliate url.

Say you were promoting a Twitter ebook and you wanted every post that used the word Twitter to link to your affiliate page, you simply add the keyword, and your affiliate URL. Then each time a post uses the word Twitter, Smart SEO Links will create links to your offer.

As I mentioned there are several premium plugins designed to do this for you. These premium plugins have 2 main advantages over SEO Smart Links;

1. Provide on the fly cloaking of affiliate link URL’s
2. Provide click tracking on each dynamic link it creates.

Using the free WordPress plugin Redirection, you can achieve the same result. In other words, you can cloak and track with just a few mouse clicks. Redirection not only allows you to do the obvious, create a 301, 302, or 307 redirection without a redirect script, it also allows you to cloak your affiliate links as well as track clicks.

Go ahead and install both plugins then come back to this guide for the setup procedure.

Scenario

In this scenario I am going to be targeting the keyword windows and use my (fake) affiliate url http://microsoft.com. I’ll be cloaking the destination url with http://incomesinternational.com/windows.

Each time the word windows appears in a post, SEO Smart Links will create a link that points to http://incomesinternational.com/windows and when a user clicks the link Redirection will take to the Microsoft home page an track the click.

Step 1 – Create a Group

I like to keep things tidy so the first thing to do is to create a new Group in Redirection. Open your WordPress dashboard then click Tools, then Redirection. Once the screen is loaded click on Groups.

Choose a name for your affiliate link group and add the new group to Redirection. Ensure that ‘enable tracking’ is selected. In this example, my new group is called Cloak.

Step 2 – Create Keywords and Links

Now we are going to setup the keywords we want to target and convert to our affiliate links. Open Settings > SEO Smart Links. Take some time to get familiar with this very simple plugin. Be careful how many links you allow to be converted per post or your site could easily end up looking spammy.

Scroll down to the Custom Keyword section. This is where you add your keywords and cloaked URL. Add a new entry for each keyword or phrase you want to create links for. In my example I’ve added the keyword windows and the destination URL of http://incomesinternational.com/windows

Step 3 – Create a Redirection

Now we head back to the Redirection configuration page. From the main page, Redirects, select your group in the drop down list. In my example I’ll select Cloak, then click Go.

At this point you’ll see an empty list. So lets put in a new affiliate link.

In the section Source URL enter the cloak URL. You do not need to add the domain. So for my example /windows is all that’s needed.

Target URL is where you’ll enter your unique affiliate link. In my case it is http://microsoft.com. Once you’ve filled in the values click the Add Redirection button.

And that’s it! Your posts will now be automatically populated with your affiliate links wherever your keywords appear.

Don’t forget that you can review the clicks for each of your links from the Redirection page by selecting the group that you created. Clicking on the number in the Clicks column will show you a complete log of who clicked, and when.

You are now ready to replace all of your html or php redirects with this much simpler method of cloaking and tracking you affiliate URL’s. And why stop there, add the cloaking method to your banner ads or anything else you want.

Did this post help you? Would you like to see more like this? Tell me about it in the comments.