Why Use Link Cloaking?  

Here are the problems link cloaking helps solve:

1. Affiliate Commission Theft – This particular problem is most rampant in the Internet marketing niche, and even more so for Clickbank affiliates.

In a standard affiliate link your affiliate ID is exposed. This means someone can replace that ID with their own or that of a friend, thus denying you a commission. This is a really bad situation when you are running an AdWords campaign and people are making you pay for clicks they then steal the commission on.

2. Increases Click Rates – There is debate about this but I am including it because there is widely referenced studies that show it is a valid reason to use link cloaking.

The only way you would know for sure is to test. Common sense seems to support this claim, though, in that a more human friendly URL eliminates some of the FUD (fear uncertainty and doubt) that may arise from a URL with a lot of funny looking technical codes in it.

3. Tracking – In order to determine the effectiveness of a campaign you need to track it. Because the link hits your server, or the server of a company providing you cloaking services, you get to grab and manipulate the data that is available.

There are many pieces of data that are automatically passed whenever a link is clicked. The method provided in this e-Book will leave the data in your log files to be evaluated by whatever stats analysis package(s) your host provides.

Or you can download the raw log files and use a spreadsheet or database package to analyze it in a way that best suits your needs.

4. Centralized Link Management – For me this is the most important reason for link cloaking. It saves you hours of time, reduce headaches, and can save you lots of cash from lost commission opportunities.

If you’ve been doing affiliate marketing for any amount of time then you have surely been notified that a campaign is ending. You have probably also discovered a better paying product of the same type, or the exact same product paying more at different network. Without link cloaking you have to track down all the places you’ve posted the link and if you have been doing your job right that’s a lot of places. You’re going to miss some.

People are going to click on the expired/changed offer before you get there to update it. And there will always be cached versions of the link (I’ve had clicks come in for campaigns from over a year ago). With link cloaking you only need to change the final destination in one place and all of the links you’ve placed, no matter how many or how old, will be sent to the right place automatically.

If it’s an expired campaign you can create your own “apology” page and try to capture their business in a different way. This beats the heck out of the terrible messages provided by the affiliate network.

If it’s the same campaign on a different network you easily start directing customer a bigger commission with only a minute or two worth of work. And the customer never knows the difference. The possibilities to customize the destination are limitless and easy to implement.

5. Keyword Relevance – While the target page may not gain any advantage from the keyword targeted URL of link you place, the page it is on will. I have had several Warrior Forum postings show up on Google page 1 based on the link in my signature file. Imagine the power of a keyword relevant link on a related article submitted to dozens of article directories.

6. Privacy – This is another big reason I use link cloaking. When done properly it can completely defeat affiliate-spying software popping up everywhere these days. The only thing these packages can track is the origination link and the destination page. Most affiliate programs don’t show your ID on the landing page so with link cloaking it is never visible to the spying software. Clickbank is one of the exceptions but fortunately you can have multiple accounts. By changing the destination account regularly you can skew the results of the spying packages.

7. Links In Email – One thing that isn’t often mentioned about the “ugly” link syndrome is only savvy Internet users usually see the “ugly” link. On the page only keyword anchor text is visible (you are using a keyword and not “click here” right?).

The ugliness is in the status bar and even at this stage of Internet use not many people look down there before clicking the link. With email this is often different.

Many email programs do not show HTML layout and so the ugliness is displayed right there in the open. If ever FUD were a factor it’s in email, which already has a high profile for spam, phishing, and other nastiness. With a cloaked link the reader gets a sense of what the link is really about, removing some of the FUD.

If you have Aweber you will recognize this next problem. Often the link is too long for one line and the email program puts an actual break in the URL address.

When someone clicks on it they end up at a 404 page because only part of the link was processed. Obviously this should be avoided as it will cost you sales. Link cloaking fixes the problem.

8. Split Testing – This is a powerful option available when you use link cloaking. With only a little bit of simple script (usually PHP) you can have a single link rotate through 2 or more alternate pages. One example is having two separate squeeze pages and testing which one converts better.

Another example, one of my favorites, is split testing the same offer on two different affiliate networks to see which creatives convert better. Sometimes a higher payout doesn’t always mean a higher ROI. I’m sure by now you see the power and importance of using link cloaking as a tool in your affiliate arsenal. Let’s take a look at the different options you have to implement the tactic.

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