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.
About Sean Rasmussen
I think cloaking the affiliate links is a good idea. After all why take silly chances when it can be done so easily
Sometimes it is much better to use a URL Shortener, as these days many web addresses are up to 4 words so having the option is good, you look at your website name and decide what is best for you
Rita
They are a good idea. Some will have other tools as well
Hello Sean,
I like Cloaking links. It shortens them down so that you can use them on twitter, as well as look great when writing on a blog. I never realised that there was other ways to shorten links beside TinyUrl
Great to see that there are options on how to create and protect your link.
Cheers
Lisa
Hi Sean,
I like shortening long URL’s also. I think it’s much better. TinyURL is good and lately I have discovered bit.ly. It’s very good as it also has a tracking option to set up so you can track how many people visit the site. Did not know about the other one. the URL Re-Direct. What a great idea also.
Sean
Is cloaking considered black hat by Google?
I have discovered bit.ly – and isn’t it so awesome. You can also see in your bit.ly account how many clicks you’ve had.
Awesome indeed Sam, highly recommended
Hi Sean,
Is trying to do the URL redirect out of our league? Would we be capable of doing it?
Jazz
No it’s not out of your league. If I can do it anybody can. I’m no geek!
I like bit.ly for my link cloaking. I see it as the ideal way to protect affiliate links. The website is easy to use and the stats are there right on your link.
Hi Helen,
I love that bit.ly provides you with stats so you can see clearly how many people clicked on your link. I find it gives me a great opportunity to play around with the text I use with the link.
You can clearly see which phrases people react to and which ones don’t work at all.
Hi Sean
I haven’t had to cloak an affiliate link yet however it will only be a matter of time until I do.
I like the idea of shortening the URL’s as it makes them look neater and for that I will have a look at TinyURL .
The consensus here seems to be to use Bit.Ly for cloaking links so I will go check on that one too.
Great information thanks Sean.
Clickbank now cloaks you link when you get them to generate a hoplink for you…prevously you used you affiliate ID as part of the URL to get paid, which was easily hijacked. I must agree that if I saw a obviously cloaked link I would not click on it.
HI Jody.
That is really cool, I never knew that. I haven’t yet started with clickbank but I have joined up and looking forward to finding some products to sell.
Cloaking your link for you is a pretty good service aye!
Hi Sean,
I have used bit.ly and find it to be pretty good as you can track all the relative clicks through your shortened links. The only thing that I have found with using bit.ly shortened url’s is that if you use them on Facebook, the link gets tagged as possible spam & you have to fill out a captcha which I thought was a bit weird.