I remember looking back a couple of years ago when surfers didn’t look so carefully at a web site’s URL before clicking a link to it. All of today’s browsers will show you the exact URL of a website on the bottom left corner of the window when you hover over a link. Many webmasters are using affiliate marketing to earn extra revenue to either make some money online or even just to cover their web site’s expenses. The problem is that anyone who has been using the internet for more than a couple days will be able to tell the difference between an affiliate URL and a normal one and nobody likes to buy a product if they know that the webmaster who sent you there will be making money from it!

The reason that people avoid clicking these links is because if they think you are an affiliate pushing a product they know that you are going to try to make it look good no matter what! This means that even if it provides useless information, outdated ideas or re-hashed material that you will still be vouching for it! I don’t know about you but I would think twice (or even three times) before I purchase something that I found through an affiliate link. This brings us to the topic at hand, cloaking your affiliate links!

Link Cloaking is basically the process of disguising your links so that surfers don’t necessarily know what they are being linked to. This is usually used for the purpose of hiding the fact that a link on your site is actually an affiliate link that you are making money from! The benefits of hiding it are listed below.

The simplest reason to cloak your links is to make your link much more appealing to potential clickers! If they don’t have fear of an affiliate marketer trying to scam them then the chances that they buy a product or even just click the link become greater! Surfers could just Bypass your Affiliate Link and go directly to the site that is selling the product and you will lose out on the commission! The second reason you will want to cloak your links is to make sure that the search engines do not penalize you for passing on PR to those websites. The reason that you signed up and registered to become an affiliate was to promote their products and make some cash, it wasn’t so that you could give them free backlinks to boost their Page Rank! The final reason that I think it is best to cloak your links is because it prevents hackers from hi-jacking your links and stealing your commissions!

Since I know a lot of people out there may not know everything there is about the internet and how to make changes to htaccess that is generally for advanced webmasters I will just explain the simplest way to cloak a URL: by using a cloaking service!

If you want to increase your chances of collecting bigger affiliate commissions then think about using a cloaking service. They are offered for free at compacturl.com and tinyurl.com! I know there are probably a bunch of others, but these two seem to be very popular and easy to use.

You can also cloak links manually by using a technique which displays a full page frame in your html page. The process is pretty simple but you need to know a little bit of basic html to do it. All you have to do is create a new .html or .php page and write a small amount of code in the of the page. It is easy to do and isn’t messy. For an HTML page use this:

< html>
< head>
< meta HTTP-EQUIV=”Refresh” CONTENT=”0; URL=http://affiliatelink.com/affiliatelink”>
< /meta>< /head>
< /html>

or if you are using PHP you can paste use this:

$url =”http://affiliatelink.com/affiliatelink”;
header(”Location: $url”);
exit();
?>

So as you can see, it isn’t too difficult to cloak your affiliate URLs so that you can make the most out of them! Try it out and try to monitor the resulting change from before and after you made the change! I am sure that your conversions will be much higher thanks to a few lines of code!




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