CBIntuition

Over the years, there has been a lot of discussion about cloaking affiliate links. Some people say that you need to do it, while others say it’s not necessary. This article discusses the reasons why you might want to cloak your links, and describes ways to do it should you decide that you need to.

First of all, what are the reasons for cloaking your links?

Commission Theft
One of the first reasons that people started to cloak affiliate links was prevent people from stealing commissions. This was particularly true for ClickBank affiliates. The format of ClickBank hoplinks was such that anyone who was themselves a ClickBank affiliate would recognise a hoplink and could replace the affiliate Nickname with their own. This would have the effect of denying the original affiliate their commission, and claiming it for themselves.
Nowadays, if you use ClickBank’s online hoplink builder, the hoplink is encrypted so that this substitution is no longer possible. However, there are thousands of old-style hoplinks still in use inside ebooks, emails and websites.

Link Length
Typically, affiliate links – not just ClickBank hoplinks – are quite long. This can cause problems inside emails where the link gets broken over two lines. The resulting link then fails to work. These long links are also quite ugly. They generally consist of a URL with one or more values tacked on the end, which identify the affiliate and maybe the product code.

Affiliate Aversion
Many people who buy products on-line don’t like to think that a proportion of their money is going to a “middle-man” and not the product vendor. This is especially true of ClickBank products where the affiliate earns 75% of the sale price. Oddly enough, if they bought the product directly from the vendor, they might not think twice about paying say $47. But when they realise that when bought via an affiliate link, about $35 of this is going to the salesman, they feel as if they are being ripped off. Cloaking a link can give the impression that the affiliate is in fact the vendor, and that there is no affiliate involved in the chain.

Product Integration
As mentioned above, many people don’t like the idea that they are paying an affiliate. By cloaking a link with your own domain name, the buyer will be led to believe that the product is your own.

For example, let’s say that you own the domain www.FantasticStuff.com.
You decide to sell a product at www.WizzoThing.com, and your affiliate link is www.WizzoThing.com/buynow.php?affid=12345.

When people see this link, they will realise that it goes to a different domain, and might become suspicious that it is an affiliated product link.
If you set up a cloaked link, however, using your own domain, it could look like this:
www.FantasticStuff.com/WizzoThing

This link looks much more convincing. It is totally integrated into your domain, so buyers will not suspect a thing.

Safety Net
I am an affiliate for an excellent piece of software that lets you build professional websites. I had my affiliate link and I promoted it on-line and in ebooks and reports. Then, after about a year, the vendor decided to change the affiliate program that they used to sell their software, and all affiliates were issued with a new affiliate link. This broke all the old affiliate links. Luckily, I had cloaked my link, so all I had to do was to update the cloak with the new link.
All my links now worked with the new system.
Now imagine if I had put the original affiliate link in all those ebooks and reports. Anyone reading them would find that the links no longer worked. Putting the cloaked link in meant that the links still work perfectly.

At the time, I didn’t realise this. It was only when the vendor changed the affiliate system that I realised what a huge benefit this was.

Aide Memoire
How many times have you wanted to include your affiliate link in some marketing, but can’t remember it? If you set up your cloaks in a similar manner, all you need to remember is the product name.
Remember the example above:
www.FantasticStuff.com/WizzoThing
It’s your domain name, followed by a slash, followed by the product name. Simple.
Set up all your cloaks in the same style and you need never forget a link.

Disadvantages
I have yet to find any disadvantages to cloaking links, so my recommendation is to always cloak your links whether you are concerned about any of the above issues or not.

Cloaking Your Links
So having established that it’s a good idea to cloak your links, how do you go about doing it?

There are a number of ways of doing it. They are all quite easy, but some do require some slight knowledge of either HTML or PHP.

The Easiest Way
This is by far the easiest way to cloak a link. It has a couple of drawbacks. The first being that the link does not match your domain, so the buyers might be suspicious that you are hiding an affiliate link. The second is that it relies on a 3rd-party service provider. If that service is changed or withdrawn, your links will fail.

This method uses URL-shortening services such as qkr.cc, tinyurl, bit.ly etc. Simply log on to one of these shortening sites, enter your affiliate link and get the short URL which you should then promote.
One major advantage of using services such as this is that many of them provide click tracking statistics.
(Personally, whenever I want to shorten a URL, I use qkr.cc, which is one of the tools provided with the free Viral Marketing Method).

The PHP Way
If you have your own domain and web hosting, the chances are that you can install and run PHP scripts. What you need to do is create a folder below your main domain space, with the name of the product you want to promote. In that folder, add a short PHP file called index.php.
That file is your link cloak, and it should contain the following 3 lines:


<?php
header("Location:YOUR_AFFILIATE_LINK");
?>


Replace YOUR_AFFILIATE_LINK with the full URL of your affiliate link, including the http:// part.

Here’s an example promoting an affiliate link to the article site, Article Content King:


<?php
header("Location:http://www.article-content-king.com/pro/?member=14696");
?>


If I was promoting this link from this blog, I would create a folder named “ack” and save this file in there as index.php.

Now all I would have to do is to promote the URL http://www.cbintuition.com/ack.

It’s really that simple.

The HTML Way
If your hosting doesn’t let you run PHP scripts (some free hosting services don’t), you can use HTML instead.

As above, you would set up a folder named after the product you want to promote, but this time, insert a file named index.html. This file should contain the lines shown below.


<html>
<head>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;YOUR_AFFILIATE_LINK">
<title>PRODUCT_NAME
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>


Again, replace YOUR_AFFILIATE_LINK with the full URL of your affiliate link, including the http:// part.
Replace PRODUCT_NAME with the name of the product you are promoting. This product name won’t usually be displayed unless the network or server is running slowly for some reason.

Again, you would promote the URL of your cloak, consisting of your domain name followed by the folder name.

More Alternatives
There are other ways of cloaking links such as domain level redirects, but the methods outlined above should work perfectly well for most users.

Final Thoughts
Some people who cloak links often use an additional folder named “recommends”, “uses” etc. This makes the final cloaked URL look something like:

www.JoeMarketer.com/recommends/ThisProduct

To me, this is a dead giveaway that it is a cloaked link. Of course, many marketers who use this method don’t hide the fact that it’s somebody else’s product. They often write in their emails something like:

“My good friend John Doe has just released ThisProduct and it’s taking the Internet world by storm. If you want to get in on it before they are all sold out, go to www.JoeMarketer.com/recommends/ThisProduct.”

This often works because the marketer is trusted to recommend good products, but if you’re concerned that people will think you’re just trying to sell them yet another affiliate product, I wouldn’t recommend this approach.

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There are many benefits to article marketing, so to say that conversion is the key may be a slight exaggeration, but this is probably the most misunderstood and under-explained benefit of article marketing.  Too many people involved in Article Marketing become obsessed with SEO and backlinks that they neglect the other aspects of this marketing method.

Of course it is not ALL about conversion. Article marketing is a great way of building links and traffic and increasing your search engine ranking, but the increased traffic and search engine rankings mean nothing if your website does not convert.

So what does article marketing have to do with website conversion?

Quiet frankly, everything!  All forms of marketing are about converting visitors into customers, and article marketing is no exception.

You may not realise this but the most important aspect of sales conversion is not your headline, your graphics, your design, your sales copy or your logo. In fact it is nothing on your web site at all. This has been proved on numerous occasions by high-performing “ugly” websites. The most effective thing you can do to increase your sales conversion is to influence people before they even visit your website.

It’s the Frame of Mind that your visitor has when they click through to your web page.

When people read articles on article sites, directories and blogs, their frame of mind is “Information Seeker”.  They are looking for information about the subject of your article.  When they stop to read your article, you have “hooked” them and you have only one chance to “reel them in”. Your article must keep the visitor hooked until they reach the end, because that is where they will find the link to your site. The only way you will keep them hooked is to provide useful, well-written, honest information on your topic. By keeping the visitor interested, you start to build a rapport and a sense of trust. It is at this point that you spark a transition in your visitor; a transition from “Information Seeker” to “Buyer”. If they reach your website as a Buyer, they are more likely to make a purchase than if they are still an Information Seeker.

If you realise this, it is very likely that you will achieve a lot more success from your article marketing efforts. Not only are you likely to make more sales, but you will naturally write better articles.

If you write your articles with the intention and purpose of “framing” the reader, you’ll not only get higher conversions from the traffic coming from your articles; the chances are that you’ll get more traffic to your articles. How? Website publishers are always on the lookout for good quality articles. If your article is well-written and informative, it becomes attractive to the publishers, who will put copies of it, or links to the original version, on their own site, complete with links to your site. That can make a HUGE difference to your sales conversion.

When a trusted publisher publishes your articles, their readers are already willing to follow their recommendation. That means that they are predisposed to “buy into” the frame of your article – they have already started to trust your article even before they have started to read it.

You see it’s a lot better to approach your article marketing as a relationship-building exercise, rather than as an SEO exercise and if you do, you will likely get better search engine rankings too, so the SEO aspects will follow on automatically.

Article Content King syndicate all your articles to targeted publishers.  Click here to submit your articles.

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