March 21, 2008
Two Easy Methods To Protect Your Affiliate Links
Affiliate marketing is an essential part of running an online business.
Marketers promote affiliate products as back end offers to their main product or as a business in itself.
Either way affiliate marketing is a method that consistently works and is becoming more and more popular even with main-stream offline companies.
One of the major problems internet marketers have when promoting affiliate products is the fact their affiliate link is clearly visible. E.g
www.productownershomepage.com/affiliate=jondow
It is clear to even the untrained eye that the link above is an affiliate link.
Now I don’t know why it is but most people don’t like buying something through an affiliate link. They prefer to go directly to the product owner’s sales page rather than credit a 3rd party with part of the sale.
It’s crazy but true. I think people are generally suspicious and untrusting of anything that looks unusual. If they think there’s even a tiny chance of them getting scammed or ripped-off in any way they will avoid it like the plague!
The problem is not quite as bad with non-internet marketing products, but even then there is a chance of an abandoned potential sale.
Here’s a dead easy way to hide your affiliate link and to make the link look like a simple recommendation:
(This is only suitable if you can publish your own website. If you don’t have the ability to publish your own sites yet. Further down I show you a different way of hiding your links.)
All you need to do is head over to this website:
Click on ‘Webmaster Tools’ and then ‘Affiliate Link Cloaker’
Here you will find a FREE tool that cloaks your affiliate link by creating a webpage that you upload to your site.
It is so easy and so quick to do and results in a great looking link like the one above!
You can also create a file and name it ‘recommends’ or ‘presents’ and save all your cloaked links there so they look even more natural.
The added bonus with using this method is your affiliate link does not become visible once the product owners webpage is loaded.
You have the opportunity to name the webpage (that is visible at the top of the screen) and the affiliate link anything you want.
If You Can’t Yet Publish Your Own Webpages
There’s a simple software program that allows you to cloak your link that doesn’t require that you publish a webpage:
All you need to do is enter your full affiliate link and the software will change it into a harmless looking URL
Here’s how it works if you wanted to promote my report – Zero To Fifty In 30 Days! 
Enter your Affiliate Link URL - http://hop.clickbank.net/?jondoe/a8402778
In this case your ClickBank affiliate nickname is ‘jondoe’
Enter a nickname for the product. You could call it 0to50 or something similar.
Enter a title for the new cloaked link page – e.g Zero To Fifty
Then hit ‘cloak it’ and you’ll have a cloaked URL for the product ‘Zero To Fifty In 30 Days!’
The cloaked URL will look something like this: http://offto.net/0to50
I’m sure you’ll agree this link looks far more attractive than: http://hop.clickbank.net/?jondoe/a8402778
All you need to do then is promote the new, cloaked link to earn your affiliate commissions!
Conclusion
Both methods are useful for hiding your affiliate links. If you are promoting internet marketing products I would strongly advice you to use the Affiliate Link Cloaker Tool and create your own unique webpage.
For non-internet marketing products and for anyone just wanting a quick, easy fix then the OffTo link cloaker is a good alternative.
~ Peter Tremayne
Filed under Blog, Internet Marketing, Product Reviews, Quick Tips by Peter Tremayne
.jpg)
.jpg)
Comments on Two Easy Methods To Protect Your Affiliate Links »
This was one of the earlier emails that I received from you. At the time, I didn't have the time to implement the process, so I filed it away. Wow, is it really simple to use. It really does make the url links look a lot better. Thanks for telling us (me) about it.