masking image affiliate links

[cmoore]

There are plenty of good plugins to mask text affiliate links. I've spent days trying to find a simple way to mask an affiliate link from an image to the vendor's website. Any suggestions? Preferably not heavy html.

[cindybidar]

The easiest way would be to set up a redirect either by hand or with a plugin, then take that link and replace the one in the image. So if the HTML for the original banner looks like this:

<a href="http://aweber.com/?316490" title="Email Marketing">
<img src="http://www.aweber.com/banners/email_marketing_easy/125x125.gif" alt="AWeber - Email Marketing Made Easy" style="border:none;" />

You would replace the link immediately following href= (between the quotes) with your shortened version.

I'm not aware of a plugin that will do this, unfortunately, but perhaps someone else has an idea.

[ChristineCobb]

Pretty Link Pro will create cloaked links. The free version will give you short urls but won't cloak them.

[cindybidar]

What exactly are they cloaking in the pro version? I've always considered just a short link (on my own domain) to be sufficient. Am I missing something?

[cmoore]

The free version is more of a mask and redirect of an individually picked keyword, while the Pro can choose and link multiple keywords out of the text, randomly. And it has the option of physically cloaking a website so, by the domain name on the newly opened page, it looks like the user is still on your site rather than the vendor's. Pretty slick. And I think your suggestion of how to redirect should work, but I couldn't make it.

[ChristineCobb]

What exactly are they cloaking in the pro version? I've always considered just a short link (on my own domain) to be sufficient. Am I missing something?

Cloaking is one of the redirect options in the pro version. It keeps your pretty link in the address bar. For example if you go to http://mybonusblog.com/trafficvideo which is my affiliate link for Jimmy D Brown's Traffic FUEL program, you'll see that link in the address bar rather than the affiliate link.