Using Ninja Affiliate to Cloak your Affiliate Links

Ninja Affiliate is a premium plugin for Wordpress. With this plugin, you'll be able to "mask" your affiliate links so that they can have a more branded and customized appearance using your site's own website URL.

Most affiliate URLs appear as long, generated or fabricated URLs. It's a character attribute for programs including CJ.com, E-Junkie and many other private affiliate programs. Many users tend to be leery of clicking on links from URLs that appear to be going to garbled, generated or re-directing links. If you're like the majority of webmasters, you know that using services like TinyURL and Bit.ly to mask or shorten your affiliate links are extremely unprofessional and unreliable.

Let's say that a typical CJ.com affiliate link looks like this:

http://www.anrdoezrs.net/click-1234567-12345678

When a user hovers over that link, that's the URL they'll see on the lower left hand side of their browser. Don't fool yourself - many people hover over links before they click them! Anyone who isn't in the affiliate marketing field will assume the link will be pointing to something shady - that's where Ninja Affiliate helps you out. Going back to that example, you can turn that awkward looking affiliate link into something much more digestible:

http://www.yoursite.com/shoes/nike

Which of these two links would you trust, as a customer? The benefit of re-naming your links to something that looks natural, trustworthy and valid doesn't need much explanation. As an affiliate marketer, you have an ultimate objective: to recommend and point your visitors toward helpful and trustworthy products, and to get credit for its sale through your affiliate cookie. Ninja Affiliate helps boost the possibility of both of these objectives!

As you'll see in the screen shot above, creating a new cloaked affiliate link is a simple three step process...with additional frills. Here's an outline of the steps involved:

1. Name your link: This simply puts the link you're creating into the Ninja Affiliate links menu, for easy access.
2. Affiliate/Destination Link: This is where you'll copy and paste your actual affiliate link.
3. Ninja Link: Here, you'll rename that ugly affiliate link to whatever you want. When someone clicks your link and goes to the affiliate page, your link still appears in the browser's address bar. There's no way that anyone can see your affiliate link!
4. Group: If you intend on having a lot of links, you'll probably want to make categories for them within Ninja Affiliate. This is purely a housekeeping feature for your Ninja Affiliate admin panel.
5. Cloak It: Whatever you enter here will be in the browser's title of the landing page (the page a user sees after they click your link).
6. Convert Keywords to Ninja Links: Enable this to turn every single instance of a word or phrase into this affiliate link! This is a powerful feature that is ideal for cases where you want to turn every instance of the word "iPod" into a hyperlink for your iPod affiliate program on all existing and new pages. When you click this box, an input area appears where you can add multiple words or phrases.
   
   This feature also offers two options: Modify status bar text, which alters what people see on the lower left hand corner of their browser, and Overwrite global settings, which lets you add the "Nofollow" attribute to your links, and Open links in new window, which is self-explanatory.

Here's a quick trial I put together, displaying all fields filled out within the "Add a new link" section of Ninja Affiliate. Be sure to take a close look at the options I chose, as you take a look at the next screen shot displaying the live results:

This screenshot shows how the text "Testing 123" was successfully pointed to what I set my "Ninja Link" attribute to (you can't see the mouse pointer, but it's hovering over that link), and, the link is being displayed on the lower left hand side of the browser.

Now that a new link has been saved, you can click the new "Detail Info" button next to it to look at each link's settings and statistics (see screenshot above). Not shown here are "referrals" data and "subcampaigns" options.