The Creative Design Blog

There’s a lot of confusion about link cloaking. The term itself sounds suspicious, like it’s a black hat method of marketing or a way to disguise your identity. The fact of the matter is, it is nothing like that. What it is is something that any internet marketer should be aware of and use, for a variety of reasons.

After you are approved for an affiliate relationship, you are given the opportunity to embed widgets of code in your site. These are clickable links that direct customers to the site that sells the product you have affiliated with. In this way, the link is tracked back to you and you can be assured that if a sale is made, you will get your commission. It doesn’t always work out that way, though.

For one thing, many people have the mistaken idea that they will be overcharged for the product or service if they purchase it via your website. Thinking they are being clever, they remove your affiliate ID from the link before clicking through.When they do this, you lose the commission that is rightfully yours.

Secondly, sophisticated hackers can use the information on your link to steal your commissions. The commission gets paid, but not to you. While hackers are usually trolling for high traffic affiliate sites and usually are savvy enough to steal only a portion of sales, even small enterprises are at risk.

What you do when you cloak a link is metaphorically put a “cloak” on top of your link. This cloak is a unique URL that does not disclose your affiliate ID. By doing this simple thing, you eliminate a number of potential problems.

Firstly, those customers who would otherwise remove your affiliate link from the URL can no longer do so. Customers rarely do that, but you needn’t worry about it anymore. Many more customers, however, get suspicious when they see that affiliate ID and it puts doubts in their minds about you and your professionalism. Your cloaked link gives them the feeling that you are a professional reseller and not just an “affiliate marketer.”

Most importantly, your link is now invulnerable to hackers. They have been denied a vital part of your personal information if your link is cloaked.

As you can see, link cloaking has nothing to do with shady black hat marketing techniques. On the contrary, it is a legitimate tool you can use to protect yourself and enhance your online credibility. If you do not cloak your links, in fact, it makes you appear amateurish in the eyes of both your customers and the companies you are affiliated with.

Many internet marketers take it one step further and create an iframe page on their website. This is a page that looks exactly like the page that the customer will be directed to when they click on the link. In the eyes of the customer, this assures them that you have a direct and legitimate connection with the company.

If you are still worried about it, by all means contact the company with which you are affiliated and ask them what their policy is regarding link cloaking. The will appreciate your asking and probably agree that it’s a good thing to do.

It’s easy to learn more about how you can multiply visits to your Internet site and click-through traffic when you use link cloaking. When you use a conversion tracking system, you will be able to improve your marketing and advertising efforts and multiply your thriving business.