Affiliate Link Cloaking

Hiding your affiliate links (Affiliate Link Cloaking) is a very useful thing to do if you are promoting affiliate products on on your website or blog. Firstly the marjority of affiliate links are computer generated, so they look long untidy and ugly. So you may want to hide the link behind a short link that looks tidy. Most important thing, however, is to protect yourself from commission hijacking, especially if you are promoting a product not only to general public, but to other internet marketers/affiliates as well. Some will change your affiliate id on the link to theirs' as soon as they see the affiliate link, so they are getting a discounted product instead of you getting your commission. . In fact in studies it was found you could be losing as much as 80% of your sales!

----------

What Affiliate Link Hijackers Do To Steal Your Commission.

I'll show you what happens when hijackers see your affiliate link to the product they want to buy. Lets assume you are promoting a ClickBank product. Your affiliate link will look like this when you mouse over it:

YourAffiliateID.ProductID.hop.clickbank.net

So, if a person is also a member of ClickBank he is very likely to copy your link instead of clicking it, then paste it to the address bar and change your AffiliateID to his. He is then getting your commission which means that he's basically buying a discounted product and you are getting nothing.

A very nasty thing to do, yes, but it happens and very often. Same with any other affiliate program, not just ClickBank. Even worse when a person simply removes your affiliate id, without being a ClickBank affiliate himself, just to leave you with no commission for the sale. There are people who do this just out of jealousy.

----------

Hiding Your Affiliate Link Using Third Party Affiliate Link Cloaker Websites

The easiest and most widely used method to hide and shorten your affiliate links is by using free cloaking services provided by third party websites. They will create a folder at their domain, which will be redirected to your original affiliate link. It takes a few minutes to create a link and your new link will usually look something like this:

http://www.[something].com/yh349d

where [something] is the name of the service
and [yh349d] - randomly generated letters and numbers

There are many to chose from, so it's not a problem to google one with domain name that you will like.

However, there are certain disadvantages of this method.

# First, you don't have access or control over their hosting or internet provider, so if their website is down your links will also become broken, and in most cases you won't notice until you click the link yourself.
# Additionally, the links are also computer generated and will usually look like the example above and will have nothing to do with the provided product, so it will be hard to remember these for your visitors.

Click here for the most popular third party affiliate link cloaker service

Also see;
• Get the right affiliates
• Make money from your affiliates
• Ad Placement
• Landing Page Help