Affiliate Link Cloaking - How It Works And Why It May Be Useful
Cloaking Your Affiliate Links To Protect Your Commissions
You may have heard the term affiliate link cloaking before and maybe you're wondering if this is something you should use on your website as well.
There are various arguments for someone to cloak their links,
- Affiliate link hijacking - this happens when another affiliate uses their own affiliate link to purchase a product. An example of this is when you read about a product on my site and clink the link to the product's main site to take examine it more closely. You then decide to purchase the product, but you copy the information in the URL and substitute your own affiliate link. When this happens, you get the commission instead of me.
- Affiliate link bypassing - this happens when someone simply removes the affiliate link to go directly to the product's main selling site. People may do this because they don't want you to get any commission.
- Affiliate link condensing - refers to the shortening of an affiliate link. Some affiliate links can be long and ugly, which are uninviting. Many people can recognize an affiliate link like this and they may not click on it because they do not like being sold to. Plus, it opens up the door for easy affiliate link hijacking and bypassing, as explained above. Your goal is to have as many people click your link as possible, so if you have a link that looks like www.productsite.com/affilatepage.php?affid=prodid6978, you would cloak the link to look something like this, www.yoursite.com/productsite, to make it look more appealing.
How To Cloak Affiliate Links
There are various ways to cloak your links, plus there exists various pieces of software that can generate pages with cloaked links for you. However, I do not recommend software that does this because doing it manually is really quite easy; it does not require a lot of HTML experience so don't waste your money on software.
The easiest way to cloak your links is to create a framed page that points to your affiliate link. What this does is essentially opens up the merchant's webpage, using your affiliate link, inside a page on your own website. To the user it looks like they've navigated to a new website, but they're still at your site.
To do this, create a blank HTML page that contains the usual html, head, and title tags. Next, create a frameset tag just below the head tag. Now add a frame tag nested within the frameset tag and include a src attribute within the frame that will include your affiliate link.
When you're done you should have something that looks like this:
<html>
<head>
<title>My Cloaked Website</title>
</head>
<frameset border="0" frameborder="0">
<frame src="YOUR AFFILIATE LINK" frameborder="no" border="0"/>
<noframes>
<body>
...
</body>
</noframes>
</frameset>
</html>
There are also variations you can do with this method. For example, you can use Unicode characters to represent your affiliate link, which will further hide your affiliate URL should any visitors decide to view the source on your page.
Another method you may want to use is a link cloaking service, such as Tinyurl. Link cloaking services will take any URL and generate a redirect for them using some sort of shortened URL. This shortened URL is usually related to the service's main URL such as http://tinyurl.com/affiliatesite.
Link cloaking services may be a better approach for you to use if you do not yet have your own website that can host cloaked pages. However, be aware that if you use this method, some pay-per-click programs and ad sites do not allow you to use a redirected URL.
To cloak or not to cloak, that is the question
Now that you know how to easily cloak your affiliate links, you may be wondering if you should in fact be using this technique.
If you feel issues such as affiliate link hijacking or bypassing present major problems for you, then affiliate link cloaking may be the way to go to protect your sales.
Some marketers consider the use of cloaked links to be dishonest, saying if you have a good enough relationship with your customers and develop a high level of trust; people will not be reluctant to click the original affiliate link. However, this really only works for email marketing or anything where you get a chance to develop trust with your readers; it does not work too well for marketing where your paying for traffic, such as PPC.
In the end, you will need to decide if affiliate link cloaking is the best approach for your business.
And in case you're wondering, I do not cloak any of my affiliate links - you will not find any cloaked links on this site. People are free to click, or not click, on any of the links I provide them. I feel being straightforward about my intentions is ultimately the best way to go for my businesses.
