Craiglist is a teeming market. Unfortunately, they don’t look kindly on affiliate links cluttering up their pages. Business affiliates have to find ways in order to “hide” their links.

One of the easiest method is to use a URL-shortening service such as TinyURL. However, the resulting link really has no identity and a lot of people are wary of clicking links with destination unknown.

A lot of affiliate marketers prowling Craiglist instead use domain redirection or forwarding so their affiliate IDs doesn’t appear at craiglist. Domain redirection or forwarding doesn’t have to be expensive as there are free subdomains out there. Dot TK is a favorite of Craiglist marketers. We believe  CO dot CC wil also work. It’s also very easy to set-up a redirect in the CO.CC panel.

We once had an interesting conversation in a webmastering forum. We asked if forum members will click on a bare affiliate link. Most of those who replied said they won’t. One particular member was insistent to the extent that he would prefer affiliate IDs to be cloaked and hidden from him in order to click on a link.

However, hiding affiliate links isn’t only about getting clicks. Sometimes we need to hide links that are too long or too ugly. For those who want to hide affiliate URLs in WordPress blogs, we found two (2) plugins that’re easy to install and use (yeah, we tried them a while back):

1. Hidden Affiliate Links.

2. GoCodes.

Hope somebody finds them useful.

Oh, we’d like to ask too if people would prefer to click on affiliate links whose IDs aren’t hidden…