If you promote affiliate products and usually link directly to that products sales page, you are missing out on some major SEO benefits!

I had a major “duh” moment today when I realized that instead of boosting another websites PR with backlinks, I COULD be boosting my own with a simple redirect. Lets say you are promoting an ebook over at ClickBank and your affiliate link is http://yourid.product.hop.clickbank.net. Wouldn’t it be nice it your link could be http://yourdomain.com/ebooks/product.php instead? It looks more professional, doesn’t give people the feeling that you are selling them something as much and most of all, links to YOUR site thus giving you more backlinks!

One other huge benefit of this is that if you put a tracking code in your new page, you can actually see who is clicking on your links and from where which you wouldn’t be able to do if your just linking right to the products landing page

Here’s How to Cloak Your Affiliate Link if You Have a Website

Open your .htaccess file. This can be found in your top directory. Enter the following:
Redirect /ebooks/product.php http://yourid.product.hop.clickbank.net

Make sure that the entery needs to be on one line, with no breaks.

Now when you go to the url http://yourdomain.com/ebooks/product.php you will automatically be redirected to the affiliate link.

Pretty nifty, eh?