Cloaking Your Affiliate Links

When you are set up as an affiliate marketing partner, you are given your personalised URL to post on your website. This is the way that a company can track clicks that result in sales from you. You may want to consider cloaking the link and here’s why.

What Is Cloaking And Why Would You Want To Do It?

Link Cloaking refers to changing the information that comes up in the status bar when someone hovers over the link.

If a visitor to your site wanted to bypass the link, they could easily do so by typing the URL directly into their web browser and visiting the merchant site without any relationship to your account. Obviously you would not get credit for this click through.

There are various reasons a visitor may do this. They might feel they can get a better deal by dealing with the company directly, thinking that your commission is added to the price. Perhaps they want another affiliate to get credit.

Then again, some people are just spiteful and don’t want you to get the money you’ve earned. Regardless of the reasons why, this is not good for your efforts to make money through your site.

There are also some website owners who feel that the affiliate link on their page is harming their organic SEO ranking or that it will interfere with a pay-per-click campaign. When Link Cloaking is used for these reasons, it can be seen as a black hat marketing tactic.

Some people worry that competitors will try to steal their information so they can hijack the sale and in some cases it just makes sense to remove the link between your site and the clicked to site so that purchasing feels like the customer’s decision. Some people will resist buying if they think they were “sold”.

Not everyone cloaks their links but if you decide that it’s something you want to do to protect your sales and to increase your number of sales, here are some tips:

3 Link Cloaking Options

Fortunately, there are several ways that you can cloak your affiliate links. Some are easy and free, while others cost a bit more in time and money.

URL Shorteners

One way to hide the actual URL is by utilising a service like Bit.Ly or TinyURL. If you have not yet heard of these sites, these are websites where you can simply input a web address and it comes back with a completely different, shortened version. This is absolutely free.

The downside is that it can be apparent that you are trying to hide something. Visitors may view you employing a URL shortening service negatively if they see no logical reason for you to do so.

Cloaking Programmes

A second option is to buy a programme that will mask the link for you. Some of them purport to help you increase your sales, too. If you are using WordPress for your blog, then you can purchase a plug-in such as Simple Link Manager or Redirection.

URL Re-Direct

And finally, probably the most preferred method is to redirect the link from another URL and do it yourself by manipulating code. This is also the most difficult method, particularly if you are not real handy with PHP scripting.

Basically, you write the script in a program like Notepad and then upload it to the appropriate directory on your web server. It sounds easy, but if you get one little portion of the script wrong, it won’t work and you could wind up re-arranging your website.

Regardless of the method you choose, Link Cloaking is a personal decision but worth considering if you want to minimise the risk of losing commissions because of an unscrupulous visitor.

Have a most outstanding day.

Sean Rasmussen
Aussie Internet Marketing
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008 - 2010