Affiliate Link Cloaking – Should you Use It?

If you’re getting started in affiliate marketing, you may have heard people talking about affiliate link cloaking and perhaps been wondering if this is something you should be doing as well.

There are several arguments for someone to cloak their links,

1. Affiliate link hijacking – occurs when someone uses their own affiliate link to purchase a product. Lets say, for example, that you read about a product on my site and click the link to the product’s main site to check it out. You then decide to buy the product, but you copy the information in the URL and then substitute your own affiliate link in place of mine. When you use the new link to buy the product, you get the commission instead of me.

2. Affiliate link bypassing – occurs when someone simply removes the affiliate link to go directly to the product’s main selling site. Some people do this because they do not want you to get the commission.

3. Affiliate link condensing – some affiliate links can be long, ugly, and uninviting, which can cause some people to avoid clicking the link. Many people will recognize an affiliate link and will not click on it because the do not like being sold to, or only view it as a sales pitch. You want as many people to click your link as possible so if you have a link that looks something like this, www.productsite.com/affiliatepage.asp?affid=prodaffid4653, you would cloak the link to look something like this, www.yoursite.com/productsite, to make it appear more inviting.

How to cloak your links

There are several ways to cloak your links and there also exist various pieces of software that will generate cloaked link pages for you. However, I do not recommend link cloaking software because doing it manually is really quite easy and does not require a lot of HTML experience.

The easiest way is to create a framed page that points to your affiliate link. To do this, create a blank HTML page with the usual html, head, and title tags. Then create a frameset tag right below the head tag and add a frame tag nested within the frameset tag. Include a src attribute within the frame tag that includes your affiliate link.

Here is a simple example of what a cloaked page should look like (I’ve removed the angled brackets to prevent the tag names from being parsed out of this article):

html

head

title – TITLE OF YOUR PAGE - /title

/head

frameset

frame src=”YOUR AFFILIATE LINK”/

/frameset

/html

This page will display your URL and page title with the affiliate page.

One other method you can use is a link cloaking service, such as tinyurl. These services will take any URL and create a redirect for them using a shortened URL (usually related to the service’s main URL. E.g. tinyurl/productsite). This may be desirable if you are marketing an affiliate product and you do not yet have your own web host. But if you use this method, be aware that some ad sites and pay-per-click programs do not allow you to use a redirected URL such as those offered by link cloaking services.

Should you cloak your affiliate links?

Now that you know the problems facing affiliate links and how to cloak them, you may be asking yourself if you should in fact use this method.

Some marketers may consider the use of cloaked links dishonest – they feel that if they have a good enough relationship with their customers and develop a high level of trust, people will not have any issues clicking on the original affiliate link (this really only works for email marketing). Others simply feel they are optimizing their marketing and protecting their sales; to get as much possible returns for their efforts as possible.

There really is no correct answer. In the end, you will need to decide if affiliate link cloaking is the best approach for your business.