Cloak Your Affiliate Link – Protect Your Links and Income

If you are new to the world of affiliate marketing, you might be wondering why it is vital to cloak your affiliate links. The reason for this is to protect what is yours. There are a lot of link thefts or hijackers around the internet that will steal your affiliate efforts and commissions. They can either edit or replace your affiliate ID with their own or by spyware on the user’s computer allowing them to collect all the commission you have earned.

Aside from this fact, link cloaking improves your potential customers trust because you provide security measures in your site. This is also one of the requirements if you want become successful in affiliate marketing, along with the good product and a good marketing campaign. You won’t go very far if you don’t choose a good product to promote and a good campaign for your marketing strategies. However, without a secured affiliate link, all your effort and time are gone wasted!

Link cloaking simply means you are not showing your affiliate ID that usually tracks your affiliate commission. You might ask yourself, “How do I cloak my affiliate links?” There are many ways to cloak your affiliate links, and those listed below are the common ways most affiliate does:

1. Using Free or Paid Cloaking Tools/Services. You might first decide whether you want to use a free or a paid affiliate cloaking tool. There are few cloaking sites available for free and it is usually make your long URL into a shorter one. This is highly concealed option that still brings to the exactly the same destination URL. However, these free tools come with fair limitations. This may limit you the number of links cloak and typically do not provide you to track your affiliate link’s performance. On the other hand, paid cloaking sites offer an additional option, which makes them worth the minimal costs that various tools charge.

2. Using HTML codes. If you have tried creating blogs and websites, you may have some sort of knowledge in HTML world. In order for you to use this method, you need a domain name and a hosting server to access the files of your website. Using a simple two-line code you are able to cloak your affiliate product links whatever you want them to be. This method will not enable you to track traffic but your cloaked affiliate link will stand out from rest since there will be no one else that will be the same URL as you.

3. Getting the right cloaking software. There are lots of good software applications available which will allow you to safeguard your affiliate marketing commissions. It is commonly installed on your own website and it works by not displaying the target URL. If a person clicks on the link, the visitor will be redirected to the URL that you’ve specified inside the script. Also, it will give an easy way to track the effectiveness of your campaigns and does not just depend on the statistics that vendors provide.

These are merely the common cloaking methods that most affiliate marketers used. And now that you already know this, you are equipped with the knowledge to protect your affiliate links and whatever you have earned from affiliate marketing will be yours and yours alone.

Source by Chris Freville