Hiding affiliate links is a great tool to use in most situations where affiliate links can be shown to the public. The point of hiding the affiliate links is for the user to go through your landing page without knowing they made you money. You want to prevent this because somebody can use their own affiliate link instead of yours and they get the sale and lead instead of the person that should get it. It is like hijacking your sale.
This method is pretty easy and used mostly if you want to promote an offer such as ringtones or car warranties. This is best for offers where a “fake search” would increase CTR (click through rate). For ringtones it would work well because you could say on that page that you are “searching for artist.. 5 seconds remaining” then they get redirected to the officially offer page. The good thing about using the redirect method is when you are using tracking, some of the tracking software needs a redirect page. In other words you will need a redirect page either way and you can just add the code for tracking and offer page in the same web page.
We as affiliate marketers love to use image buttons because it looks user-friendly and us humans by nature will click an image. In contrast if there was a “push button” ignition in a car and there was a normal turn the key ignition which would you pick? I’m sure more than half if not all would prefer the push button because it takes less work.
