Link cloaking is a very important part of affiliate marketing.? In
a nutshell, link cloaking is a way to protect your affiliate
commissions from being stolen.? It’s not totally foolproof. ?Clever
individuals can still figure out how to keep you from getting?your commission.
But most won’t go that far, so cloaking your links will
prevent most commission loss. How do people steal affiliate
commissions?? Well, have you ever hovered over a link and noticed
that the link was an obvious affiliate link?
Some people type in the parent domain instead of clicking the link
as a way of making sure the owner of the site gets paid 100% for
the sale.? Some people falsely believe that if they buy from an
affiliate link, they’ll have to pay more for a commission mark-up.
Some people actually do it for a different reason.? If you’re
promoting a JVZoo product, especially to other marketers, many
of them know they can insert their own JVZoo ID and get
a 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.? Most people don’t do that,
of course, but it happens.
Most people are pretty honest, and don’t mind giving you a little
affiliate commission in exchange for recommending a good product to
them.? But it’s enough of a concern that you should take steps to
prevent it.
You can easily set up your own link cloaking system.? You can set
up a directory on one of your domains.? Most marketers use the
domain of their own name, as in bobsmith.com.? Then they typically
have a subdirectory called /recommends/.
Inside of that directory, they create a new subdirectory for each
product, like this: bobsmith.com/recommends/
directory, they place what’s called a redirect file, which
instantly takes the visitor to the actual affiliate link without
displaying it. You can easily find out how create a redirect by
looking it up online. It’s very simple to do.
Here is an in depth article on this technique
There are also a number of link cloaking scripts available.? Most
of them are relatively easy to install and use.? There’s a big
benefit to using a script rather than doing it yourself.? Using
your simple redirect, there isn’t an easy way to check how much
traffic you’ve sent to your link, like scripts do.
Most link cloaking scripts also allow you to add new links very
easily within an administrative area, and then each link is tracked
so that you can see how much traffic is going through the link.? If
you use your own file, the only way to tell how much traffic you’ve
sent is through your affiliate stats, which may be inaccurate, or
through your web server’s stats, which may be difficult to use and
hard to understand.
Cloaking your affiliate links is the smart thing to do if you want
to be sure you are protecting your hard-earned commissions online.
