Posts Tagged ‘Cloak Links’

How to Easily Increase Your Affiliate Profits by 30%

January 9th, 2010

Selling affiliate products is a great way to start a new online business. It’s free to get started and you can begin making money right away! But there are some pitfalls along the way. One of the biggest problems in the affiliate marketing area is theft.  It is estimated that the average marketer experiences a 30% loss of affiliate revenue due to theft!

 

A good question that puzzles many new website owners suffering this fate is, “how does it happen”? The answer is straight forward; thieves view the source code of your web page and easily obtain the URL of the affiliate links along with relevant details. They replace Your affiliate ID with their own ID and create a new affiliate link. Then they use this new link to purchase the product. The result is, you lose a commission and the thief gets a discount. Most affiliate marketers are not even aware that they were robbed.

 

So how do you protect yourself against these thieves? The best way to protect your affiliate profits is to cloak your links. A good cloaking system hides your affiliate ID from these dishonest individuals. There are several cloaking techniques that you can use to protect your profits.

 

The first and easiest is to use is Tinyurl. This web service is free and is very easy to use. You simply go to the website and enter your affiliate URL into the text box. They’ll provide you with an alternate URL for that link. The new link that they provide effectively hides your affiliate ID. There are many other companies that provide the same type service but this is among the most well known.         

 

There is also software available that will cloak your links. Some of the software is quite expensive but inexpensive options also exist. So, stop those affiliate thieves in their tracks. Take back the 30% that they’ve been stealing and protect your profits with affiliate links.

 

Check out my newest ebook for some great ways to cloak your affiliate links.

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Why Should you Cloak your Affiliate Links?

November 4th, 2009

You may have heard about affiliate link cloaking and perhaps you’re wondering if this is something you should be doing as well.

Although some people may consider cloaked links to be a little dishonest – that you’re trying to deceive your customers – I feel there are some valid reasons why you may want to consider cloaking your links.

1. Affiliate links can be hijacked – this occurs when someone, usually another affiliate, uses their own affiliate link to purchase the product you’re promoting. For example, let’s say I read about a product on your site and decide to check out the product’s main sales site by clicking on your link. I then decide to purchase the product, however I copy the URL and then substitute my affiliate link in place of yours. When I buy the product using this new link, the commission is mine even though you did all the work to get me to buy the product.

2. Affiliate links can be bypassed – this happens when a visitor simply navigates directly to the product’s main sales site by removing the affiliate link. Some people may do this because they do not want you to receive any commission for the purchase they’re about to make, even though you’re the one that directed them towards the product.

3. You can condense your affiliate links – many affiliate links can appear long, ugly, and uninviting for visitors to click on. People may avoid clicking on links that look unattractive so you may want to condense your link by cloaking it.

Now that you’re aware of the various problems plaguing affiliate links, you may be asking yourself if you should actually use this method.

There are some that feel affiliate link cloaking is a little dishonest, while others feel they’re simply protecting their sales and maximizing their marketing efforts. You will need to ultimately decide whether affiliate link cloaking is right for your business.

Do you want to learn more about affiliate link cloaking and find out exactly how to cloak your links?

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4 Ways To Hide Affiliate Links

November 4th, 2009

Affiliate link hijacking is a big problem, some people will change your affiliate URL to their own before purchasing a product so they themselves get paid the commission giving them a discounted product.
This problem is far worse if you are promoting to the affiliate marketers crowd as they can spot an affiliate link from 100 yards away! They will just replace your affiliate ID with their own and “hijack” your commissions.
Some people just simply hate the thought that you will make a commission from their purchase and will just cut off your affiliate ID at the end of the URL. If you don’t take steps to try and hide your affiliate links from hijackers, then you will carry on losing commissions.
Using a redirect php script
This is an easy technique to implement, all you have to do is create a single php file that includes a small piece of code, so if you are trying to promote www-yourID.merchID.hop.clickbank-net then you way create a blank page called, say, http://discounts.php that just contains the redirect script, so the actual link you promote would be www-yoursite-com/discounts.
Unfortunately this technique does have one drawback, some affiliate merchant links will still be visible in the browser address bar, it works great with clickbank products.
Using .htaccess to hide links.
This is works very much the same as the one above except you don’t need to use any scripts, you just need to add a line of code to your .htaccess file.
As with the redirect script above, just create a blank page and upload it to your server, then add the following line of code to your .htaccess file.
Unfortunately this has the same drawbacks as the redirect script method, your affiliate link may still be visible on the merchants site in the browser address bar.
Using a zero-frame to cloak links.
This is the cloaking technique I use most often to hide affiliate links.
Using this method makes it look as if you are sending people to a page on YOUR site, even your URL will be still be visible in the address bar unlike the above cloaking techniques, people will think they are still on your site but they are actually viewing the merchants site.
You simply create a page as mentioned above and insert a few lines of code, I also add a title meta tag to fit the description of the product I’m selling.
However, you MUST test your link before promoting it! This technique can effect the tracking on some sites, so make sure that you will be getting credit for all the traffic you send their way.
How to hide links in a browser.
This technique is used on your website so that when someone hovers over a link, they don’t see the actual destination link in their browser status bar.
So if your actual link was www-affiliateproduct-com/uglyaffiliatelink?123 they would only see http://www.yoursite.com in their browser.
So there you have it, 4 easy ways to hide or cloak your affiliate links, using these techniques will certainly increase your sales and reduce link hijacking.
If you aren’t using any techniques to hide your affiliate links then I can guarantee that you are losing affiliate commissions! You must protect yourself from these hijackers, the harder you make it for people to recognise an affiliate link, the more commission you will make.

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Affiliate Links and How to Cloak Them

November 1st, 2009

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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5 Ways to Shorten and Protect Affiliate Links With Free Software

October 28th, 2009

Affiliate programs are booming these days and many serious minded marketers have been making lots of money. However, affiliate programs are also fraught with risks like stealware and other malicious exploits that steal commissions from marketers. However, there are some great ways to protect your affiliate commissions, so you wouldn’t lose a cent.
Here are top 5 ways to protect your affiliate links and your commissions:
Why having unsafe links is problematic?
Typically, most affiliate marketers use standardized affiliate links that direct the customers to the merchant site. The problem with this is that customers can easily identify it as an affiliate link. It also makes your affiliate marketing more vulnerable to hackers and malicious people who can easily steal your commissions as well by replacing cookies. The best way to prevent customers or such malicious groups from identifying your URLs is to cloak them. There is free software available these days that can effectively help you cloak your links.
Affiliate link cloaking: how to go about it?
Customers tend to hesitate clicking on an affiliate link simply because they are tired of all those promotions. Then there are stealware and other malicious software that constantly keep track of affiliate links and try to steal commissions away from unsuspecting affiliate marketers. You can avail various software for free these days that can help you effectively cloak your links. You can use any of the following techniques to cloak your links:
1) Banner servers:
Banner servers are great because any advertisements that direct customers on these servers will have extremely long text links. This way, your customer will never be able to read the entire link to know it is actually an affiliate redirect. However, installing a banner advertisement server can be time consuming and complex so this may not be the best option for you. Moreover, banner servers cost money.
2) Scripts and software tracking:
You can also use software as well as various scripts to track the click-throughs from customers. This software will never display the affiliate links directly and instead show the link to the tracking software that has been installed on the affiliate’s – marketer’s website.
3) Using JavaScript:
You can also cloak your affiliate links using JavaScript. For example, if your target URL is:
Just replace – with for a code to work:
-a onClick=”javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview(’/outgoing/article_exit_link’);” href=”http://www.merchntxyz.com/app/aftrack.php?afid=12345″ target=”_blank” onmouseover=”window.status=’http://www.merchant.abc.com’;return true;” onmouseout=”window.status=’ ‘;return true;”-Click here-/a-
In this example, merchntxyz is your merchant advertising company – your unique affiliate link. The first portion of the URL contains your own affiliate link while the second portion of this URL shows what actually gets shown on the status bar of the browser. The end portion of the URL is the text link. Once a customer clicks on this link a new window loads so that you don’t end up losing your customer from your affiliate site.
4) Ultimate cloaking method:
One of the best and most fool-proof methods of performing cloaking on your affiliate links is to create a separate html file on your website, i.e. http://www.marketersdomain.com/greatprogram.html and paste the following HTML code into that website. Just replace that merchantxyz link with your own link to your affiliate program. This way your affiliate links will be cloaked and you won’t lose a single cent!
Note: please, replace – with characters, since this code won’t work.
-html-
-head-
-meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”-
-meta http-equiv=’refresh’ content=’0; url=http://www.merchntxyz.com/app/aftrack.php?afid=12345′-
-/head-
-/html-
5) Select a good affiliate network that supports affiliate link cloaking:
There are some good affiliate networks that automatically protects your affiliate link, so your affiliate commissions could not be stolen. Click2sell.EU (http://www.click2sell.eu) is an affiliate programs network that believes in protecting its affiliates. It is a highly reputed and renowned affiliate program site that has all the protections to protect your affiliate commissions. When you choose a network of affiliate programs to promote products, make sure to choose a good one that will provide you with full securities, so your affiliate commissions could not be stolen!

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