Affiliate sales amount to billions of dollars each year. Most successful online use affiliate sales for at least a portion of their business. To direct buyers to your affiliate products, it is necessary to include a link to the product that you are promoting. These are called affiliate links. Each link includes the name of the product you are recommending as well as you own personal ID for that program.

Affiliate links are a necessary component in the Internet marketing business. But we sometimes find that unscrupulous people steal them. There are shady people out there who will look at your affiliate link and consummate the sale after replacing your affiliate ID with their own. It is a fact of doing business on the Internet. For that reason, if you want to make serious money in that arena, you should always cloak your affiliate links.

In addition to lost sales, there is another reason to cloak your affiliate links; they look unprofessional and announce that fact that it is an affiliate product. And unfortunately, there are those out there who will not knowingly buy affiliate sponsored products. For those reasons, it is best to cloak your affiliate links.

There a number of techniques that you can use to do this. Following are four tactics that you can use to cloak your links:

1. Use free link cloaking sites. These sites will allow you to enter a URL and they will convert it into a cloaked link. Tinyurl is probably the most well known of these sites but there are many others that do the same thing. You can find these sites by doing a search for ‘free affiliate cloaking.’

2. You can also use software, both free and paid, that will cloak your links. You can find hundreds of software programs by searching for ‘affiliate cloaking software.’   

3. An option that most super affiliates use is the purchase of a domain name for one specific affiliate product. Using this tactic, they either develop a specialized landing page or use either domain forwarding or re-directs to link to the affiliate products.

4. As an alternative to purchasing your own domain, you can use a page within your existing site and re-direct traffic from that page. If you are uncertain how to use re-directs, you can see many examples by doing a search for ‘link redirects.’

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