If you’ve ever tried to create a magazine style layout in WordPress, you know how hard it can be if your theme doesn’t have a column or magazine layout option or page template. Well, I just released a free WordPress plugin, Easy Columns to help you solve that problem.

Easy Columns allows you to create unlimited columns in at least fifteen variations of 1/4, 1/2, 3/4, 1/3, and 2/3 width columns on any post or page on your site, regardless of the theme you’re using.

The result are columns that look consistent and fit nicely in a business site, product pages, or a portfolio style layout. You can even use single columns for testimonials or other content that you’d like to call attention to.

You also have the option to override the original CSS per column style and dial in the exact width and margins, and adding columns is as easy as “pick n’ click” in the visual editor.

So head on over to the Easy Columns page and pick up the free WordPress plugin – and feel free to leave some feedback!

Ok, we have a little bit of an announcement to make! We’ve migrated the “old” site, FreeAffiliateLinkCloaking.com to AffiliateTechHelp.com. Why would we do this? Simple – we want to expand the site and offer more to you in the way of affiliate marketing tips, code, tricks and general – well, tech help!

While the old site was good for link cloaking, we felt that it was too limited in it’s scope. However, we still wanted to keep the same cool tools, plugins and templates available for you.

We plan on really expanding the site over the next few weeks and months, including some really good tech articles specifically made for affiliate marketing, and we’re definitely going to expand our offering of plugins and useful tools.

In fact, be on the lookout for a brand new plugin to hit the site this week!

Of course, we need your help in bringing you the information you want. Tell us in the comments – what information, tips or tricks do you really want to see – information that will help you take your marketing up a notch? Let us know!

Anyway, we hope you like the new direction we’re taking the site. I know I’m excited!

If you use WordPress for your affiliate marketing (and you should!), then you probably know how powerful WordPress is when you use all the free plugins that are available to you. Did you know that you can turn WordPress into a link cloaker machine with just two plugins. That’s it!

I’ve seen some affiliate link cloaking plugins for sale for $47 – why spend the cash when you can do nearly the same thing for free?! So let’s get started, shall we? Ok, first things first – you’ll need those plugins. Ok wait, I lied. If you’re not running WordPress 3.0 or you are but you’re using a theme that doesn’t support WordPress’ new menu system, then you’ll need 3 plugins. Hey, if you aren’t rocking the latest version of WordPress, then you should be!

Back to the link cloaking plugins… Go get these:

Redirect by Nick Berlette

Robots Meta by Joost de Valk

Exclude Pages from Navigation by Simon Wheatley

Once you’ve got the plugins downloaded, you can get them loaded into your blog by Selecting Plugins, then Add New in your Dashboard

Add Link Cloaking Plugins to Your WordPress Blog

You can go ahead and activate those bad boys, and let’s move on to how the plugins work together to help you mask affiliate links.

Redirect

This is the most important plugin we’ll be using. Redirect allows you to create a 301 redirect out of any page or post on your site to another link, even a link off-site – say, an affiliate link?

Robots Meta

It’s a fact that Google doesn’t like finding redirects on your website that point off-site, and you can actually suffer a little “Google slap” for it and lose ranking if the bots crawl your site and find it loaded with redirected pages. To solve this problem, you need to tell the search engine bots to not index, crawl or follow certain pages on your site. You can do that by adding meta tags to your redirect pages, and this plugin will do it with no trouble at all.

Exclude Pages from Navigation

If you’re setting up your WordPress site to be an actual blog instead of a marketing mini site or if you plan on having more than a few redirects, then you want to exclude those cloaked affiliate links from your WordPress Pages/Posts menus. Exclude Pages does a great job of this.

Getting Started – Create Your On-Site Page

Before we create our pages, you should have your permalinks set up to be “friendly”. This basically means that your links will be easy to read and most importantly, SEO friendly. To do that, you’ll head to Settings, then click Permalinks and set it up like so, or however you’re accustomed:

To begin cloaking affiliate links, you’ll need to create a page on your site. Now, one technique I like to use is to create a “base” page (not a post) and name it something like “Likes” or “Recommends”. This will do two things: first, it’ll make your link more “clickable” and not so sales like, and second, it provides a parent page for all your masked affiliate links so they’re easy to manage.

When you create your base page, you don’t need to add any content, but you’ll want to use the Robots Meta plugin. In the right column of your editor, you’ll see the Robots Meta menu. Set your page to “noindex, nofollow” and save your page. Remember this, because you’ll use this setting on every cloaked affiliate link page you create!

If you’re using a theme that’s not compatible with the new menu system in WordPress 3.0, you’ll want to make sure Exclude Pages is installed. IF you do have it installed, you’ll also see on the right column the Exclude Pages menu. You’ll want to exclude your base affiliate link cloaking page, so make sure the “Include this page in list of pages” option is unchecked. This makes sure that the page won’t show up in your menus.

If you are using a WP3.0 compatible theme, then you can just not include the base link cloaking page in your menu, and it’ll have the same effect.

Save that page, and let’s go create ourselves a super easy cloaked affiliate link page!

Finally! Creating your Masked Affiliate Link Page

Ok, so you’ve created your base page, and now you can move on and start creating your cloaked link farm! Create a page with a name of the product you’re promoting. For example, let’s say I want to promote Mark Ling’s AffilioJetpack program that’s coming out soon. Why? First, it’s hands down one of the best ways for anyone to get started marketing online. Second, Mark Ling knows his stuff and is an affiliate marketing badass. Third, because I have to use some kind of affiliate link as an example!

Step 1. Ok, so let’s light this candle. Create a new page in WordPress and name it after the product you’re promoting. Since I’m pimping AffilioJetpack, that’s what I’ll name the page. It’s SEO friendly, and visitors will see the link and know what it’s linking to.

Step 2. On the right column, you’ll see the Page Attributes menu. Pull down the “Parent” option and set the base page we created (Likes or Recommends) as the parent page. What that’ll do is create the permalink structure on your site like this: www.YourSite.com/likes/affiliojetpack. See how sexy that is? Here’s what my Page Attributes menu looks like:

Step 3. In your Robots Meta menu, make sure you’ve checked “noindex,nofollow”.

Step 4. This one’s optional if your theme doesn’t support the newer WordPress menu system. In the Exclude Pages menu, make sure that “Include this page in list of pages” is unchecked.

Step 5. No scroll down and you’ll see the Custom Fields box. Click the EnterNew button and in the Name field add “redirect“. In the Value field, paste your affiliate link (see below). Once you’ve got that done, click the Add Custom Field button.

Step 6. Publish! Congrats, you just cloaked affiliate links in WordPress for free! Below is how my cloaked link looks:

http://www.affiliatetechhelp.com/likes/affiliojetpack/ (go ahead, click it!)

What Just Happened

When you added the custom field “redirect” to your page, you’re telling the Redirect plugin where to send the user when they access the link cloaking page. The Exclude Pages plugin keeps the page from showing up in all your menus, and the Robots Meta plugin keeps the Google bots and other search engines from slapping you because you have redirects.

Now go forth, Grasshopper, and start marketing and cloaking your links with WordPress!

We’ve got a new video today on why it’s important to drop affiliate cookies in your sales copy. If you’re not dropping cookies, you’re giving away commissions!

Many times users leave your page for a variety of reasons, and they’ll end up at the vendor’s website where they’ll buy. If you drop a cookie in your sales copy, then all your hard work getting the user to your site and ultimately to the vendor’s purchase page will have paid off, and you’ll get a commission.

To see how this works and a demonstration of the cookie dropping code, check the new training video: “Why You Should Drop Affiliate Cookies“

Cloaking affiliate links for your money making websites used to be easy. You used to be able to find a link cloaker online (or worse yet, pay for one) and it would generate a little snippet of HTML and JavaScript code to hide or redirect your affiliate link, making your link look different in the browser status bar.

Guess what – that old method just doesn’t work anymore!

What used to be

Those days are long gone, and link cloaking just got a little harder. As of FireFox 3 and Internet Explorer 7, the browsers no longer process the code that changes the browser status bar. Here’s what the old code used to look like:

<a href="http://ugly-link.com" onmouseover="window.status='http://pretty-link';return true;" onmouseout="window.status='';return true;">Buy my Awesome Product!</a>

Not too bad, right? The old URL cloak involved some inline JavaScript code would change the browser status bar when a user moved the mouse over the link. This is now seen as “spoofing”, or showing a user one link while sending them to another.

From the Microsoft website:

Status Bar Scripting–Scripts will no longer be able to set the status bar text through the window.status and window.defaultStatus methods by default in the Internet and Restricted Zones. This helps prevent attackers from leveraging those methods to spoof the status bar.

and in FireFox, a user has to jump through some hoops in their browser options to enable status bar changes: Tools → Options → Content → Enable JavaScript / Advanced → Change status bar text

Cloaking Links the Right Way

So what’s an affiliate marketer to do? Obviously, we have to adjust and find more creative ways to keep those conversions and commissions moving. While the method is a little more complicated now, it’s not painful, and can be done pretty easily with the right tools.

If you want to cloak your links, you have one basic option – redirect visitors to that vendor’s link from a page on your site. However, there are a couple options on how you can pull that off.

The simplest method is to create a page that either uses a Meta Tag to redirect your links, or some simple php code to do the job. Once you have your redirect page uploaded, you’d just link to that in your sales copy and voila! your link is cloaked.

Another method is to use a little more code and create an iFramed page that includes your affiliate link. The resulting page looks like it’s still on your site, and you can still get your visitor tot he link. Both methods work, and it’s the marketer’s preference as to which works best. Personally, I like iFrames – you can add tracking code to the page for split testing and goal funnels, where a redirect won’t give you that ability.

The Right Tools for the Job

“But, I’m a marketer, not a code monkey!” No worries. There are plenty of tools out there – free and paid – that help you cloak your links. One tool (my favorite) is our brand new Ultimate Link Cloaking Tool (didn’t see that coming, did you?). This tool offers 4 different options for cloaking links, as well as some other options most cloaking tools don’t have.

How about a ClickBank sales page bypass tool for those products that have God-awful sales pages? And if you really want to boost conversions, it even has some cookie dropping code so even if your visitor doesn’t click today, they still get that all important cookie.

Hey, all. I’m proud to announce that I’ve just completed a very powerful WordPress template specifically for affiliate marketing.  It’s a hybrid sales page and link cloaking/redirecting template.

It works in any theme and has 15 custom fields available to allow full customization by even the newest of the newbies. Here’s a sample of what kind of sales pages you can generate with just a few quick edits:

It’s optimized for SEO and uses the most minimal CSS and layout for speed and ease of customizing. Head on over to the official Ultimate Sales-Cloaker Template page for more info and a download link.