I was on a forum today and the title of this thread stood out: “Are you undercover?”

Obviously, if you’re a Star Trek fan like me, the first thing that comes to mind is the Klingons and their cloaking devices that they use on their ships to hide from the Starship Federation and any other enemies.

People also use a variety of “cloaking devices” to hide their affiliate links or mask them so they can be used on Facebook.

Many people new to internet marketing head straight to URL shortener sites like bit.ly or tinyurl.com to shorten affiliate links. Bit.ly is one of the most popular sites because it provides pretty good tracking information.

While it’s a good idea to hide your links if they’ve been banned from Facebook and other social media sites as possible spam, you could actually be ruining your reputation as a shady marketer if you get it wrong.

The top three ways to use your blog as a “cloaking device” for your affiliate links:

Whenever you want to hide your affiliate links, it is my opinion that you should always do it in a way that maintains your own brand, and does not “look” like you are trying to hide anything.

I do this in one of three ways: two using my blog and one using a subdomain with my main business blog domain:

1. I think the best way is to write a blog post about the product you want to promote. So you don’t have to cover up anything. Just share your blog post. This accomplishes a couple of things.

   1. Continue to build your authority in your niche;
   2. You maintain your brand and share content, thus generating traffic to your blog and sharing your link at the same time.
2. Use a free WordPress plugin called “Pretty Link”. If you use WordPress as your blogging platform, you don’t need to spend more money buying a bunch of domain names. Just install Pretty Link and you can “hide” your links while maintaining your brand.
3. If you want to use subdomains, use your main branded blog domain to create subdomains for your product links. GoDaddy is the best place to register your domain and use subdomains.

Using any of these three methods, or a combination, will save time and money. You don’t have to keep thinking about new domain names to sign up, and you’re not spending money on a lot of different domain names.

I think either of these methods works best, although I mainly use methods 1 and 2 most of the time. I rarely create subdomains because I prefer to work directly within my WordPress dashboard; it’s easier and faster.