In internet marketing, there are two schools of thought with respect to link cloaking. Link cloaking involves making your links to affiliate websites look like regular links instead of affiliate links which many people recognise by strange letter combinations or URL names.

With school of thought number one, you might think it’s better to be up front about being an affiliate selling a product either by saying so or simply by presenting your link with your code in it without worrying about cloaking. On the other side, some  suggest people are more likely to buy your product if they don’t think they’re being sales pitched or sold to. For some reason, a lot of people don’t feel good about someone getting a commission off their purchase. Some will even try to avoid your affiliate link if they really want to buy it and you led them there. This is why many affiliate programs will credit you with the sale due to a ninety-day http cookie.

You might consider conducting experiments and seeing what bodes better for you. If you choose to cloak your links, there are free tools like Tinyurl.com that can take a long URL and turn it short as well as make it difficult to see where someone is about to click through to.  This type of tool can be useful for more than just affiliate marketing. It can be great in micro blogging environments like Twitter and Plurk or anywhere else that has a 140 character maximum.

Link Cloaking Tools

If you’ve decided that cloaking is something you want to do, there are link cloaking tools that are free and available for a fee. Do be careful you’re not cloaking beyond recognition or you could impact your ability to get paid through companies such as ClickBank.