If you visit any Internet marketing forum, you will find plenty of advice telling you to cloak your affiliate links. Most serious affiliate marketers acknowledge that link cloaking is a very important part of their online success. Are you protected?
What is link cloaking?
It is way to mask or hide the URL code of the link in order to protect your affiliate commissions from being stolen by unscrupulous people. Because there are many different ways to steal, there is no 100% foolproof method of link cloaking. However, commission theft is a big enough problem to have spawned a slew of scripts and software programs for cloaking links.
How do people steal your affiliate commissions?
Whenever you mouse over a link’s anchor text, the underlying URL code is visible. If it is obvious that it is an affiliate link, there is a tendency not to click not on it.
Some online shoppers mistakenly believe that if they buy from an affiliate link, they will pay a higher price to cover your commission. It is not that they are deliberately trying to steal from you but because of their false mindset, they type in the product’s domain name directly in their browser and thus deny you a commission.
There are a bunch of really smart coders who unfortunately prefer to use their talents to steal from others. If you expose your full affiliate URL to them, they know how to inject their own affiliate IDs and pocket the commissions from your hard-earned traffic.
If you’re promoting a ClickBank product, especially to other Internet marketers, many of them know they can insert their own ClickBank ID and get what is usually a 50% or more discount on the product.
This is a different type of affiliate commission theft, because the person doing it gets the affiliate commission themselves, rather than just making sure you don’t get it.
Of course, most Internet marketers don’t do that, but there are enough dishonest people out there for link cloaking to be a big concern.
You can review Clickbanks’ official position on this by reading Protecting Your HopLinks.
DiY and free solutions for cloaking links:
It is not very difficult to set up your link cloaking system. Here are a few easy ways:
- Use a service like TinyURL or bit.ly to shorten and hide your affiliate links. Both services are free to use. However, they do make ugly looking links like this: bit.ly/6jQAVr. Of the two, bit.ly gives you the advantage of basic tracking of your links that TinyURL does not.
- Assuming you have your domain name registered, set up a sub-directory in your root directory. Name it something like “recommends” and add an HTML page with the following code:<html><head><title>YOUR AFFILIATE PRODUCT NAME</title>
<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0;url=http://YOUR AFFILIATE URL”>
</head>
<body>
<p><a href=”http://YOUR AFFILIATE URL”>AFFILIATE PRODUCT NAME</a></p>
</body>
</html>Now save the page with name like product_name.htm(html) and upload it to the “recommends” sub-directory on your server.
Now, your affiliate links will look a lot more elegant like this: http://YOURDOMAINNAME.com/recommends/ product_name.htm to redirect people to your affiliate sales page.
You can do the same thing with a PHP file by adding the code:
<?php
header(“Location:http://YOUR AFFILIATE URL”);
exit();
?>
http://YOURDOMAINNAME.com/recommends/product_name.phpI prefer to use this method.
- If you are an avid affiliate marketer with lots of products to promote then take it a step further by buying a cheap domain name like yournamerecommends.com and add all your affiliate links to that domain.With this method, link cloaking is done through an .htaccess redirect. Even though it is a little bit trickier to set this up, you now have the advantage of having all your affiliate links in one central location. All you have to do is edit this one file whenever there is a change.I found an excellent step-by-step tutorial at http://www.webmasterstricks.com/wt-6-link-cloaking.php.
Link cloaking scripts:
If you’d rather not mess with creating HTML/PHP pages and manually coding, you can buy a link cloaking script to automate the whole process. Some of the good ones include a whole lot more than just hiding your affiliate URLs. That in my opinion, is the biggest advantage of using a script, especially if you are a serious affiliate marketer with hundreds of links to cloak and track. The two that I like are:
- Ninja Link Cloaker by Matt Haslem
- Phantom Link Cloaker from Cindy Battye, John Merrick & Soren Jordansen (The Clickbank Pirates). You can also sign up to download their free report.
(Yup ,those are my affiliate links)
Now that you know more about why and how to cloak your affiliate links, it is time to do something about it. It is a lot more than just hiding your links from prying eyes. Cloaking links allows you to insert your own extra affiliate cookies, redirect users to your own lead capture page, and even entice new buyers with an appealing non-affiliate styled link.
[Update: 01/13/2010]: Found a new Wordpress plugin that does a neat job masking your links. Check out Pretty Link. The plugin is free and then there’s a paid upgrade for the pro version.
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I have been looking for a way to cloak my links. Didn’t want to spend money on an expensive script. Thanks for showing me how to do it myself for free.
Commission theft has been a long term problem, only way you can combat it is to cloak your affiliate link, thanks for your tips!
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Hi,
I found your blog on google and read a few of your other posts. I just added you to my Google News Reader. Keep up the great work Look forward to reading more from you in the future.
Jenni.
Thanks Jenni.
Will definately be back to check this out in the future