Affiliate Link Cloaking Tips - Part 1

Filed under: Affiliate Marketing by colevans @ 1:26 pm |

The Reasons For Cloaking Affiliate Links

Cloaking links in any Internet Marketing activity is important, especially in email marketing because:

In the Internet Marketing game, their are plenty affiliate link hijackers who will simply substitute your affiliate ID with their own in the link, and earn a commission on their own purchase.
By using a decent link cloaking system there is no visible affiliate link for link hijackers to manipulate to their own advantage.
Uncloaked links leave you vulnerable to spam complaints and the chance of losing your affiliate account. Uncloaked links in an email have a direct link to the website you are selling the product for, and if a subscriber lodges a spam complaint with their ISP, the ISP could get the website shut down. To counter this, many website owners do not allow affiliates to use their affiliate link directly in email promotions.
Any link cloaking system will have your own website domain in the link which helps to protect the product owner (for whom you are selling the product on commission) from spam complaints.
Cloaking links can assist in building brand awareness for you or your website. One of the easiest ways to do this is to upload all the webpages which cloak your affiliate links into a folder on your website named “Recommends” or “Go” - the link you use in your emails will look something like this:
http://www.Your-Website.com/Recommends/This-Product.html
Using a link cloaking system you can quickly change the destination page to send your subscribers. Often a product you are selling as an affiliate is withdrawn, or the website is closed. If you have used a direct link to the website or product in the email you sent your subscribers, you will be sending your subscribers to something which doesn’t exist, and you will lose credibility.
However, if you have used a link cloaking system, all you have to do is change the link in the webpage on your site (or the service) which does the cloaking and you can send your subscribers to an alternate webpage.
A decent link cloaking system will provide you with click tracking records. If you participate in any form of email marketing this is import - As an Internet Marketer you need to know how many subscribers respond to the emails you send so you can fine tune your marketing.
There are an infinite number of variables you could test, and you would do this by using a system known as split tracking. For example, you might want to learn which type of email subject results in the highest click rate. To test this you would create two emails with identical content, but with different subjects and send one email to half your list and the other email to the rest of your list. By using a different cloaked link in each email you would soon learn which subject line resulted in the highest click rate.

Click the following link to read part two -> Affiliate Link cloaking - Part 2

You can download the three part Link cloaking Tips as a single PDF file by right clicking on the PDF image to the right ->

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Tags: affiliate link, affiliate marketing, affiliate redirect, internet marketing, link cloaker, link cloaking