Posts Tagged ‘Cloaking’

Protecting Your Affilaite Links

January 9th, 2010

Copyright (c) 2009 Vivienne Moore

Promoting your affiliate website to earn commissions can be depressing and frustrating because your commissions are small in comparison to the traffic your generating for your site. Beware the unethical people out there may be stealing your referral links and replacing it with their id which is very devious. Or the main website may be getting your customers because it is a short URL and more presentable that the long complicated referral URL.

Implementing measures to prevent commission theft from the unethical thieves is important. It is an important to cloak or mask your affiliate links to protect your income. Cloaking disguises you’re affiliate link with another shorter and more effective website address. Your potential customers see a shortened more appealing masked website link only so customers don’t know the parent company website and the internet pirates are prevented from stealing your commissions.

The Good:Short readable affiliate links are generated automatically with the Viral URL program. Your free memberships enables you to cloak your affiliate links. It is worth upgrading your membership to receive the extra advertising credits and bonuses. The resources available are plentiful in the members area which allows you to easily jump start promoting. Building mailing lists,tracking statistics and earning ad credits is included with this program. Access to text, banner and email ads to promote your affiliate products is included in the members area to generate traffic using you cloaked link.

Website link cloaking is simple and easy with the instructions given. A tutorial video is available for the advanced cloaking methods. Viral URL affiliate program also allows you the opportunity to promote and earn commissions. Everything you require to promote Viral URL is included with your membership. With the upgraded membership the bonus area is full of useful extras. The member’s area would be good for the newbie because it is easy to understand and implement the techniques given.

The Viral URL system keeps the internet pirates away from stealing your commissions with cloaking referral links, gives you the opportunity to become an affiliate and offers 3 different avenues to generate traffic to your affiliate websites. Upgrading your membership offers a lot more potential for supplementing your income by promoting affiliate products. A ticket submission system is available to assist the customer with a prompt reply.

The Bad:Live support seems to offline a lot of the time and the drop down menu bars can be difficult to use. Dull and strange color scheme is very unattractive. The long introduction essay given for the benefits of promoting viral URL is a little boring and a little repetitive. Improving usability by reducing the padding up of explanation. I wasn’t really interested in reading all the information.

The Verdict:Definitely Recommend.Free membership and upgraded memberships are available. Free the membership still gives you a lot of benefits. Cloaking your referral links preventing the theft of your commissions with the added options of banner email and text ads to increase traffic. Promoting viral URL as an affiliate is easy as all the promotional tools are provided.

If you are serious about affiliate marketing and keeping your commissions this program is perfect for you.

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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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Affilliate Link Cloaking And How It Helps To Optimize You Business

January 3rd, 2010

Many business owners would recognize the term affiliate link cloaking. But, a lot of new entrepreneurs headed into the business market might be a little confused as to this term. Essentially what affiliate link cloaking is being able to strip your affiliate link from any website so that no hackers will have the opportunity to steal your affiliate link.
Because the World Wide Web is so popular today, people who spend their time on the Internet just waiting to scam other people is growing by leaps and bounds. This is why it is so important to have software in place such as affiliate link cloaking in place to help protect the innocent.
When most people become involved in an affiliate program, they do so because of the promised commission that they hope to gain. But, with the opportunity of losing these commissions to hackers, they sometimes will shy away from opportunities like these. With an affiliate link cloaking system in place, this will eliminate this fear and can help regular people keep the commissions that they have worked so hard for.
The affiliate link cloaking system will enable you to hide your affiliate link so that it can not be tampered with, but it is still visible for other’s to see it and click on it if they wish. With this type of system, you can be assured that any and all commissions will end up in your pocket exactly where they belong.
A lot of people when disguising their affiliate urls will think they have it hidden beyond the commission thief’s eyes, but in reality they haven’t. Because of all the high tech software out on the market today, it is extremely easy for hacker’s to go in and look at the changed urls and then make it there own.
With an affiliate link cloaking system, the hackers are unable to penetrate this type of code, so they are unsuccessful in their efforts to steal from you.
The initial cost of the affiliate link cloaking system may seem to be not worth it, but if you make a lot of affiliate commissions and then start to see them decrease, you may re-think the purchase to see your affiliate commissions go back up to where they should be.
It is a very simple piece of software to use, and extremely easy to have installed. Although the affiliate link cloaking software sounds like it would be a hassle to use, it really isn’t. All you need to do is install it and let the system work for you. After the software is installed a visitor clicks on what they think is your affiliate id, the system then takes them to your real id.
This enables you to receive the traffic that you worked so hard to attract and enables your affiliate company or program to pay out the proper affiliate commissions to you. Any hacker hasn’t been able to break through this system, as they are unaware that the cloaked id url is not your real one.

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How To Make More Affiliate Sales By Cloaking Your Affiliate Links With Your Own Domain Name

December 7th, 2009

Do you know that by simply cloaking your affiliate links, you can make more affiliate sales?

And the best part is that if you already own a domain name and have your own web host, you can do just that.

The purpose of this article is to give a step-by-step procedure of how to cloak your affiliate links with your own domain name.

WHAT IS AFFILIATE MARKETING?

First thing first…what exactly is Affiliate Marketing?

Simply put, Affiliate Marketing is one of the many Internet Business models to earn a commission by marketing someone else’s products.

Usually, an experienced Internet marketer creates a product (for example, an e-Book explaining how to do something or solve a specific problem) to market on the Internet. Instead of doing all by himself, he can also allow affiliates to market it by paying out a certain commission, which can range from a measly few percent to a huge 75 or even 80+ percent!

AFFILIATE LINKS

Thus, when an affiliate marketer joins the affiliate program, he or she will be given an affiliate link to promote the said product. The affiliate link usually contain an Affiliate ID that is either selected by the affiliate or generated by the system when signing up.

The affiliate marketer can then promote the product via his website, emails, classified ads, etc by quoting this affiliate link.

As long as someone else purchases the product via this affiliate link, the affiliate marketer will get paid the predetermined commission.

WHY MUST YOU CLOAK YOUR AFFILIATE LINKS?

There are at least two reasons why you must cloak your affiliate links.

Firstly, there are reports that sales are “stolen” by other affiliates who simply replace the affiliate links when making purchases.

For example, if I am an affiliate marketer with an online marketplace (such as “successgoldmine.com”) and my Affiliate ID is “rogerloh”, my affiliate link can be something like that:

rogerloh.productname.successgoldmine.com

So, before making a purchase for himself, it is an easy matter for another affiliate with Affiliate ID “dishonest” to substitute mine as shown:

dishonest.productname.successgoldmine.com

Secondly, an affiliate link is usually not-so-nice-looking like this:

www.successgoldmine.com/redirect.html?link=rogerloh

Can you imagine if you get an even longer affiliate link than the one above and placing it into your own email and send out?

Not only the affiliate link may wrap into two lines or more, it is most likely “unclickable”. Thus, it will reduce the chance of a sale when the reader is genuinely interested in the product but does not know to copy and paste the affiliate link into a browser.

HOW TO CLOAK YOUR AFFILIATE LINKS WITH YOUR OWN DOMAIN NAME

Now, let’s get down to the bolts and nuts of the how-to…

For this to work, these are the requirements:

1) You must have your own domain name, eg. http://www.YourDomainName.com2) You are able to create a HTML file eg. YourFile.html3) You are able to upload your file to your website with your domain name.

Here are the steps:

1) Use Notepad or your favorite HTML Editor (such as FrontPage or Nvu) and create a new HTML file.

For example, I created a new file called “bk01_josh.html”

2) Insert the following lines just before the /head HTML tag in your new file.

(NOTE: For technical reasons, I have used square brackets “[" and "]” instead of the angle brackets in the HTML code below.

Please replace the square bracket with the standard HTML angle brackets in the HTML code below.)

[script language="JavaScript"][!--[removed]=”Your Affiliate Link URL”;// –][/script]

3) Upload your file to your website with your domain name.

For example, I used one of my domains “FactsAboutDavinci.com”

Now, all I have to do is to promote this link in my marketing, such as website, emails, etc:

www.FactsAboutDavinci.com/bk01_josh.html

Thus, when someone clicks the above link, it will redirect him or her to the company that markets this product. And now, the link looks much more presentable and professional.

 

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Why You Need To Cloak Your Affiliate Links

November 28th, 2009

One of the most important components to your entire affiliate empire is the links you use to get those sales. These links can be slapped on for the whole world to see, or they can be cloaked so that it glaringly obvious that they are affiliate links. Most wise old affiliate sages believe that cloaking the links is the best overall practice.
Affiliate marketing isn’t new. People have been utilizing affiliate links for years, so many readers will know an affiliate link a mile away. Some won’t, of course, but many will. This means that an uncloaked link with your affiliate number out in the open for all to see is too easily manipulated if the buyer should decide they don’t want you to have the sale. They may also decide they feel like giving the sale to themselves rather than you, and get their own affiliate link to use. And, there are a lot of marketers out there that make joining their affiliate network easy in order to take advantage of sales like that. I could name a few sites that do, but I won’t. Suffice it to say that if the buy link is right next to the become an affiliate link, they probably anticipate lots of buyers joining to get a commission on their own sale. With a cloaked link, the buyer may not realize that the sale is going to someone else, or how easy it is to switch the numbers. If you have a high number of sales and only two or three people a month try to switch the link, it is still worth it to cloak.
Another problem with naked links is that some of them just look bad. You have probably seen affiliate links that are long and convoluted, with a never ending stream of numbers and letters. That is just unattractive. It also may make internet newbies wonder what the heck that thing is and whether it contains a virus or the plague. If you don’t want to cloak the link altogether you might think about shortening it to make it look a little more attractive.
There are those out there, however, who recommend keeping the link as is, no matter what the thing looks like, to avoid any appearance of dishonesty. This may go well with your own affiliate philosophy, or you may have difficulty with the technical aspects. Either way, there are still sales out there to be made, but you can anticipate losing a few to link changers. When trying to decide whether to cloak, you should take a look at your page and try to see what other people see. Does the link look easy and non-threatening? How hard would it be to just cut out the affiliate number? What is the content like on the rest of the page? If the page is all about honesty and trust, do you really want to then cloak the link? The links should fit in with the style and content of your page. Cloaked or naked, as long as the link flows well on the page and will invite readers to click, there will still be sales made.

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Affiliate Link Cloaking – Should you Use It?

November 11th, 2009

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.

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Protect Your Affiliate Links from Internet Pirates!

November 7th, 2009

So you’ve decided to join an Affiliate Program …maybe three or four Affliate Programs. You’ve invested money on advertising and you send people to a link that looks like this: www.http://yoursite.com/5930294/cgi-bin/57308&8/gotit/htlm. UGH! This isn’t pretty! But not only that, it can present a host of problems.

First of all, what do savvy customers do? They simply cut off everything after the dot com and go directly to the parent company. Why? Sometimes because they realize that you are promoting an affiliate product and figure that they can get the affiliate commission themselves! Other times, because the link isn’t live and they have to type a long, complicated address into their browser window. This takes time and effort. So what’s the result? You lose your commission even though you paid to advertise the product!

Picture an even worse scenario. An unscrupulous, Internet pirate spots your affiliate link and cleverly replaces it with his own affiliate link. Now HE gets your commission! Does this seem fair? Of course not! You’ve spent good money to advertise and lots of time has been invested as well.

There is another area worthy of consideration. If you market Affiliate Programs, then you most likely write articles to promote them. If you don’t already, you should look into this wonderfully easy, inexpensive way to advertise your Affiliate Programs. But most article directories will not allow affiliate links in your article or in the author resource box. If you have your own website, you can simply send readers to a landing page on your site and redirect them from there. But if you don’t, you’ve hit a roadblock.

But don’t worry. There is a super-easy, very inexpensive way which is now available to hide your links and redirect them.

Here’s how it works in a nutshell:

You choose a domain name related to your topic. You register to have your long, unattractive, affiliate link redirect to your new, catchy domain name. You now send customers to www.yourprettysite.com instead of www.http://yoursite.com/5930294/cgi-bin/57308&8/gotit/htlm. Your affiliate link is hidden (cloaked) from your visitor, as well as from Internet pirates, yet your sales and commissions are tracked correctly. More article sites and directories will accept your article because there is no obvious affiliate link. Could it be any easier?

And honestly, think about the aesthetics! Which looks better? Which is more professional looking? Which looks like a real website and which looks like an Internet marketer wanna-be?

When you advertise with your own, shortened domain name, your customers will be confident that they are dealing with a real company, not a fly-by-night newbie! Get the respect you deserve!

There are so many benefits to this program and so ways to make it work for you. Instead of paying for separate domain names for each of your different affiliate programs, which I did in the beginning, before I discovered this service, you can set up sub-domains. So for example, if you click http://domain.yourprettysite.com, you would be redirected to my affiliate program on domain names, but if you click http://newsletter.yourprettysite.com, you would be redirected to an offer for a free newsletter on Internet marketing. See how the domain name of “yourprettysite.com” doesn’t change, but the word before it does? Pretty clever, eh? So if you’re promoting more than one affiliate program, you can code them differently, all for the same inexpensive price.

Until recently, this type of service would cost you an arm and a leg. But not any more! You will be very pleasantly surprised when you see what it costs to transform you from affiliate newbie to professional in no time at all!

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Protect Your Affiliate Links

November 6th, 2009

So, you have finally decided to step into the world of making money online!  You too, like others, have decided to start with affiliate programs; also, you must have heard that it’s not difficult to make good money with affiliate marketing, provided you choose the right programs and do some strategic planning while promoting your affiliate products.  So far, so good.  Whether you are promoting other people’s products or promoting your own products doesn’t matter because, after all, it is nothing more but your own business and your means to earn good money.  So whichever be your case, I am sure you would not want to leave money on the table and invite others to steal your share of profits.Even though the industry of affiliate marketing is pretty competitive, if you are cautious and are strategic in your marketing techniques, then it could be very profitable for you.  Take a close look at the industry and you will see that not everyone who enters the world of affiliate marketing is successful.  People who are doing well leave no room for failure and take all security measures and understand the importance of this.  Security is one of the key factors in affiliate marketing.  If you do not adopt proper security measures, then your business will be at high risk.  One of the most important ways to restore security is to protect your affiliate links.  Do not take them for granted!  A bit of carelessness on your part with regard to affiliate links may cost you lots of dollars.Do you know the long complicated links that you send your prospective customers not only look convoluted, but they can create a lot of problems, as well?  If you send such an affiliate link to your customers, then the smart ones will definitely figure out that you are promoting someone else’s product and they would rather visit the parent company; also, if your link does not function, then your customers have to type in the really long URL into the browser, which will definitely put him or her off.You could be a victim of an even worse situation.  What is some devious Internet pirates steal your affiliate links and replace them with theirs?  If they do that, then you get no commission at all.Did I scare you off with all of the above possibilities?  Well, that certainly wasn’t my intention.  I just wanted to open your eyes and state facts that actually happen in the world of the Internet.  So, if you’re not getting the desired results from your affiliate marketing, don’t lose hope.  There’s definitely a remedy for this problen.  

Everyone doing online marketing shoulder have a link cloaker that protects you in the truest sense.  There may be many unethical people lurking around who might play with your affiliate links by cutting them off or replacing them with their own.  No matter how much effort you put toward building and advertising your business, if your links are tampered with, then all your hard work will be rendered useless.Save yourself from getting ripped off.  Get all the commissions to your account that you rightfully deserve.  It is a blessing for every affiliate member like you and me who wants to achieve success in their endeavor.Ideally, you should select a program that can help protect your commissions, as well as building mailing lists and tracking statistics for visitors to your website – in short, a program allows you to create massive business leverage.For detailed information about a program that accomplishes these things for you, go to http://www.selfsar.com.To Your Success!

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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.’

 

Do you want to learn other techniques on how to make money? Get my new ebook and start making money online!

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Affiliate Link Cloaking – Why Should you Use It?

October 30th, 2009

Have you heard people talking about Affiliate Link Cloaking? Perhaps you’ve been wondering how it works and if it’s something you should be using on your website?

There are a couple practical reasons why you may want to cloak your affiliate links,

1. Affiliate links can be hijacked – this is when someone, usually another affiliate, uses their own affiliate link to purchase the product you’re promoting. They can copy your affiliate URL and then plug in their own affiliate id, effectively stealing your commission.

2. Affiliate links can be bypassed – this is when someone simply goes directly to the merchant’s main sales site by removing your affiliate link. People may do this because they don’t want you to get any commission for the product they’re purchasing.

There are also various cosmetic reasons why you may want to cloak your affiliate links, the most useful being affiliate link condensing. Some affiliate links are long and ugly, which makes them appear unattractive and some people may avoid clicking the link. Affiliate links like this are easily recognizable by many people, which may cause them to avoid clicking the link because they feel it’s a sales pitch. Plus, an affiliate link that stand out opens the door for affiliate link hijacking and bypassing.How Do I Cloak My Affiliate Links?

The easiest way to cloak your affiliate links is to create a framed page. This is explained in detail at No-Nonsense-Marketing.com – Affiliate Link Cloaking.

If you do not have your own website to host a cloaked page, you may want to consider a link cloaking service such as TinyURL.com. Link cloaking services take a URL and generate a redirect for them using a shortened URL such as tinyurl.com/merchantsite. However, if you decide to use a link cloaking service, be aware that some pay-per-click programs and ad sites don’t allow the use of redirected URLs.

Once you’ve learned how to cloak your links, you may ask yourself if this technique is appropriate for your website. Cloaking your affiliate links can be a useful technique to secure your commissions, but it is a little misleading to your visitors. You will ultimately need to decide if affiliate link cloaking is right for your business.

Find the insider scoop on the latest Internet Marketing products before you buy them! – Internet Marketing Reviews

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