Why and How to Cloak Your Affiliate Links?

If you are into affiliate marketing, you must have heard about affiliate link cloaking. It is a process that helps you protect your affiliate links from hijackers. As an Internet marketer, you obviously do not want your commissions to get stolen. If you do not cloak your affiliate links thoroughly, they can easily be hijacked and all your commissions may get transferred to someone else's account. The easiest way to protect your links is to use a good affiliate cloaking software program. Here is a brief rundown on some of the reasons why you should cloak your affiliate links.

Link Protection From Hijackers

Hijacking of links is very easy if they are not cloaked. For example, if you are using the affiliate program of ClickBank and another user of the same affiliate merchant decides to purchase the product you are promoting, he/she can easily replace your username in the URL with his/her username. This way, the commission will actually go into his/her account and not yours. You worked so hard to promote products and in the end when it was time to get your commission, you are deprived of that. This is definitely a very disappointing situation. That is the reason why you are strongly recommended to use a link clocking software program.

The Problem Of Link Condensing

Another problem with the uncloaked affiliate links is that they are very long and look quite uninviting and ugly. Spamming is one of the biggest threats on the Internet today and users think twice before clicking on a link. If the link looks ugly and unusually long, they will probably avoid clicking on the same. Besides that, some people who after getting convinced by your website to purchase the product may not click on your link if they recognize that it is actually an affiliate link. They will assume that you are selling product only to earn a commission. On the other hand, when you clock the link thoroughly, it will appear more inviting for the user and they will not be able to recognize whether it is an affiliate link.

There are plenty of link cloaking software programs available on Internet - some are free while others come with a price tag. The free ones might sound alluring, but considering the threats that uncloaked affiliate links bring, you probably might not like to take a chance. Free cloakers 'suck' because they involve complex programming with no guaranteed results. If you go wrong with the programming stuff, it will be all one big mess for you. On the other hand, the paid cloakers are not only easy to use but also guarantee optimum protection for your links.