Creating a regular expression for a cloaked affiliate link
No one wants to do things hundreds of times. If there's a way you can automate something, you should. This applies when you're uploading thousands of products as well as when you have a ton of affiliate links. If you recommend multiple affiliate links on one site, you can use a pattern-matching technology called regular expressions to create affiliate links on-the-fly. This way, you don't have to create a cloaked link for every single product.
It also makes it very easy to manage affiliate links. Sometimes, affiliate links change due to a change on the vendor's side. When that happens, if you use a regular expression, you only have to change the link in one place. If you have hundreds of affiliate links, you'll have to change each one manually.
Getting ready
You need to have the Redirection plugin installed and know how to create a basic cloaked link. See the preceding recipe, Cloaking an affiliate link, to...