If you are running a blog or website and are trying to get some added profit by advertising a service, you may be missing out on huge amounts of added profit! Why? Well first of all, when you sign up as an “affiliate” for a service or product, you will typically be given a link that looks like “http://www.website.com/?ref=29458″ to send to friends. This is basically a link that a website can use to track who is sending them new subscribers and reward them for their efforts. But if you are actually using that link… you are a bigger fool than me!

Put yourself in the eyes of a reader. If you come across a link in their website that looks as shifty as “http://www.demoproduct.com/?ref=3994d&d=229″ you are going to say hey, forget him, I’ll just go to “demoproduct.com” directly! I know what you are saying, “oh, they won’t do that… my readers want to help me!”… WRONG! It’s human nature, sorry. If they click on the link at all, which they probably won’t, you will lose a lot of income from those people that just take the ID# out altogether. So let’s guard against this, and I’ll show you how I currently have tons of active referrals earning me money while I sleep! :D

What you DON’T need
First things first, don’t fall for trap products that claim to do all of the work for you. I had the misfortune of buying “WP-Affiliate Pro” myself, and it was basically just throwing away $100, it stunk. All this software did was instead of making a referral for “http://www.demoproduct.com/?refID=3949″ it changed it to a link on my site that now looked like “http://www.thenetfool.com/?refID=23″. Well that was helpful… I think not! People see these referral id numbers and warning lights go off.

Also, don’t try to be sneaky and use a different link text than your link url (e.g. http://www.example.com), you need to realize your readers are smarter than that. We need to get away from numbers & letters and do it for ourselves completely free!

Learn The Net Fool’s Masking Method!
I’ve tricked you guys long enough :D . The fact of the matter is that you need a better way to display links than what these affiliate websites give you as a default. Notice when you click on my link to sign up for SWATcash, it looks like it is a normal page on my website (”http://www.thenetfool.com/go/page.php”)! Convincing, eh?

Here’s a little secret: all it is, is a redirecting script…. and that’s all you need!

Here’s what you do. First, make a new folder (I called mine “go”) to put all of your links inside. Then, just make a new .php, .html or .htm file for each website you want to advertise and use the following code:

 <html>
 <head>
 <title>WebSite Name</title>
 <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
 <script>
 window.location="http://website-referral-link.com/ref=you";
 </script>
 <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="1;
 url=http://website-referral-link.com/ref=you">
 </head>
 <body>
 <p align="center">You are being taken to the correct page.
 <br>If the page doesn't load after 5 seconds,
 <a href="http://website-referral-link.com/ref=you">
 click here</a>.</p>
 </body>
 </html>

Not bad eh? Just switch out the link they give you into the three URL’s and put in the name of your website. Whenever someone clicks on your disguised link (http://www.yoursite.com/go/website.php), they are going to be redirected to your real referral link… and you have your first sale! :D

The Power of Masking Affiliate Links
Does this really work? Absolutely. Since changing up all of my links to this “stealth” method, I have had great success getting referrals that earn money for me. Using SWATcash as an example, I currently have $15.78 earned from 36 referrals this month alone, and I am getting a new referral active about once every two days!

By using this new method of redirecting affiliate links, you will make more money from your readers, guaranteed. People are much more likely to click on a friendly link pointing to your website, than a sketchy link with the dreaded question marks and numbers tacked onto the end.

People complain sometimes that this is essentially “tricking” your users. I say, why not? If you make the sale, you deserve to have your piece of the pie. Bottom Line: Mask your links to get the most revenue out of all your readers! ;)

-The Net Fool

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