Top 5 Reasons To Cloak Your Affiliate Links
Protecting Affiliates From Casual Thievery. A lot of affiliate links - especially ClickBank links - are easily decoded by individuals who are interested in buying a product but don't want to reward the affiliate for referring them to that product. A bit of cut-and-paste is all it takes to change a naked affiliate link so that the original referrer doesn't get credit for the sale. With a cloaked link it takes a lot more work on the part of the "affiliate thief".
Hiding the Affiliate Link's True Nature. Most people know that online marketers get something back from vendors for promoting specific products. But they pretend not to notice it and they'd rather not see the affiliate be blatant about it. And for those who don't realize that the affiliate gets a cut of the sale, why point it out to them with a very-obviously affiliate link?
Creating Human-Friendly, Clickable Links. Affiliate links tend to be ugly. So ugly they look like they were designed by and for computers, not humans. Which is actually the case, since a computer has to be able to track the affiliate who referred the sale, and the easiest way to do that is to use a computer-generated link. Even ClickBank links, which don't look as bad as many affiliate links, aren't that appealing. A cloaked link, on the other hand, is hand-crafted by a human to by appealing and unassuming. Which makes it more likely to be clicked.
Shortening Long Affiliate Links. Besides being ugly, many affiliate links are simply too long. When pasted in an email message, these links often end up wrapping across two or more lines and the end result is often unclickable - making it that much harder to generate any kind of sales from the link. Cloaked links are usually very short.
Handling Affiliate Link Changes. Although it's rare, sometimes the product vendor switches the affiliate network or else makes changes to the format of the product's affiliate links. By cloaking the product link, the affiliate has to change just one link in order to use the correct format.
As you can see, these are all good reasons to cloak your links, and there's nothing deceptive about the practice. You just want to make sure that you're being properly credited for the traffic you're sending to the vendor's site. And that makes perfect business sense.
Related Tags: links, marketing, online, affiliate, linking, url, cloak, cloaking, shortening
Eric Giguere is the author of Link Cloaking For The Mystified, the inexpensive and no-nonsense guide for non-technical computer users to cloaking affiliate links as well as other kinds of links. This article was adapted from the book and is copyright ©2007 Eric Giguere. The article may be copied and posted anywhere as long as the text and links are left intact.
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