As a blogger with over 50,000 visitors every month I need to find ways of monetizing my site. After all having a huge visitor count is great on paper and when approaching advertisers but it falls short of paying the rent every month and buying expensive toys that I can’t resist! I’ve still got my eye on you £600 camera..

One way of monetizing my cycling site is through the use of Affiliate Links. My audience is interested in cycling products so whenever I mention a product that I genuinely like, trust and would use myself (remembering trust is everything) I add a link. Often these links look very unsightly. Take for example this typical affiliate window link:

http://www.awin1.com/cread.php?platform=dl&awinmid=1857&awinaffid=87595&clickref=&p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wiggle.co.uk%2Fp%2Fcycle%2F7%2FErgon_GC2_Handlebar_Grips%2F5360036781%2F

It’s like Shrek of the affiliate links. The solution is to cloak the link. So it looks a little something more like this:

http://www.londoncyclist.co.uk/go/ergon/

That’s much more snazzy.

People are more likely to click on the second link as it looks more trust worthy. For a start it has your brand name behind it and secondly there is not a ton of scary looking characters that they don’t recognise.

It is links like the first one that I first discovered affiliate marketing because I typed in awin1.com to see what it referred to. It is how I came across affiliate window and the sites such as Wiggle and Evans Cycles that you can promote with it.

How you link cloak in wordpress

To do this all you need is a plugin called the Link Cloaking Plugin. It works wonders with WordPress and I’ve never had any issues with it. The founders behind the Link Cloaking Plugin have also recently released a premium version which adds some great new features in particular the ability to look at detailed statistics of how many clicks the link has received.

Once the link cloaking plugin is added to WordPress you can click on Tools > Cloaked links and add new links. You can also change the /go/ part of the link from the Settings > Link Cloaking page.

Give the plugin a download today and remove all the ugly links from your site.

Soon I’ll discuss in detail how to use the plugin. I’ll also take a look at some competing link cloaking plugins and go into the features of the advanced version.