Free hidden affiliate links Wordpress plugin

I’ve been hearing about DealDotCom all week and even checked it out since almost every blogger I’ve come across has a post about it with an affiliate link, of course.

Then this morning, I received an email from one of my mailing lists pitching a software called WP Affiliate Pro now selling at a special $49.88 from its usual $97 price.

Affiliate link cloaking has become an indispensible part of affiliate marketing because of a number of reasons which are security related and not just to fool people into clicking it to make money.

But there’s a Wordpress plugin you can use that’s free.

Affiliate link cloaking is used because:
1. Editing numerous links sitewide is easier with making changes in one place.
2. Affiliate links tend to be very long with lots of alphanumeric components. Cloaking it neatens it up.
3. Tampering of affiliate code is reduced.
4. Cloaked links make for better SEO.

Instead of paying $49.88, which is still steep for a piece of code even though it’s a big discount from the original $97, you can try out a free Wordpress plugin Hidden Affiliate Links v0.2 which does basically the same thing.

This free Wordpress plugin allows you to replace keywords or phrases of an affiliate code with your own specified phrase. For example I specify my preferred keywords recommends/tla for my affiliate link http://tinyurl.com/2owmgm. In my posts, whenever I use http://www.someuseless.info/recommends/tla and someone clicks on it, they are redirected to my affiliate link http://tinyurl.com/2owmgm.

It uses Ajax API, so certain versions of WordPress may not work but since it’s free, it’s worth trying out. If it works, you save $49.88.