Link Cloaking
What is Link Cloaking, why should you do it, and how do you do it?
Link cloaking is a means of using a URL or web address to go hide another web address. There are a number of reasons why you might want to do this, which are explained below.
Cloaking Affiliate Links
The main reason why most people want to cloak their links is to hide the fact that it is an affiliate link. Again, there are a few reasons why you might want to do that;
The first is to prevent other people from removing your affiliate ID from the link, thus denying you the commission that you would usually earn from the sale of a product. In some cases, especially with ClickBank, affiliates have been known to replace your affiliate ID with their own so that they themselves earn the commission. All your promotional efforts and costs are in vain when this happens.
In reality, though, it probably doesn’t happen as often as some people would lead you to believe. Only a ClickBank Affiliate would recognise the link, and only a small number of them would replace your ID with their own. Having said that, there’s nothing wrong with protecting your efforts by cloaking your links.
The second reason why you might want to cloak an affiliate link is to reduce the length and complexity of the link. For example, you might have an affiliate link that looks something like this:
http://www.somevendorsdomain.com/products/gizmo.php?affid=230561&tracking=4829
This doesn’t look too good. If it’s printed somewhere, people aren’t going to want to type all that in, and there’s a danger of mis-typing if they did.
By cloaking the link, you could give them a simpler link such as:
http://www.yourdomain.com/gizmo
The third reason why you might want to cloak your affiliate link is that you can make the link look as if it is in your own domain instead of somebody else’s. That gives your customers more confidence because it looks as though it’s your product, even though it’s not.
Other Benefits
I only realised this one myself a few weeks ago. I had an affiliate link for a well-known software product, and I cloaked it as I do for all of my links.
The vendor of the product released a new version of the software and at the same time, changed the affiliate system they were using. This meant that all affiliates had to re-apply for affiliate status and obtain a new affiliate link.
I thought that I would then have to go through all my web pages and advertisements, changing the affiliate links. Then I realised that I had used my cloaked link in all my sales pages and ads. So all I had to do was update my cloak with the new link and all my pages worked just fine.
It also meant that any links in emails I sent out still worked, because they all point back to my cloak.
More importantly, links contained within ebooks that I have written will also still work – they will just go to the new location.
How many times have you opened an old ebook or email, only to find that the links no longer work? As long as the vendor continues to sell the product and I am an affiliate, my cloaked links will still work just fine.
How Do You Cloak a Link?
Cloaking a link can be done in several ways, but my favourite, and the easiest is a simple PHP redirection.
- First decide on the link that you want to use as a cloak. In this example, I’m going to promote a product called “gizmo” and use this link:
http://www.mydomain.com/products/gizmo
to promote an affiliate link
http://www.somevendorsdomain.com/gizmo.php?affid=230561&tracking=4829 - Next I create a folder in my domain called products/gizmo.
- I create a file called index.php containing this code:
<?php header("Location: http://www.somevendorsdomain.com/gizmo.php?affid=230561&tracking=4829"); ?> - I then upload that file to the new folder that I created in step 1. And that’s it! All I have to do is promote my new link, http://www.mydomain.com/products/gizmo.
Article Marketing
