Affiliate Cloaking – Why Is It Important To Cloak Affiliate Links?

First, what does “cloaking” mean ?
Cloaking an affiliate link means changing the “look” of a link so the visitor CANNOT have any clue if it belongs to an affiliate or not.

If you promote Clickbank products, their affiliate links have been looking like this for a long time :

http://xxxxxx.yyyyyy.hop.clickbank.net

I.e. : http://AFFILIATE.kickbutt.hop.clickbank.net

But these links can easily be noticed into the status bar.. and it can result into loss in sales.

There are two main reasons why you should cloak your affiliate links.

Reason #1 :
..is because people don’t like to know they are being sold to.
When someone smells a salesman coming around, we are all taking a step back.. right ?

Because we know that the main purpose of this all.. if for them to make money !

now if I do have a domain named
www.ThisIsMyWebsite.com

I could easily cloak this link :

http://AFFILIATE.kickbutt.hop.clickbank.net

so it looks like this :
www.ThisIsMyWebsite.com/WHATeverIwant

It looks way less like someone selling something.. isn’t ?

(I’ll show you how to cloak your links at the end of this page)

Reason #2 :
..is because of the other affiliates who wants to buy your product.
Let’s pretend I am an affiliate on Clickbank, and I find a website talking about this great product. If I see a link, I click on it, and it looks just normal:
..chances are that I might purchase that product right away.

If I like this same product, and when I click on a link, I see that it’s actually a product from clickbank.. I could change YOUR link for MINE.. Copy this link in my address bar, and go back on the sales page.

What does this do ?
Instead of you making $50 when I buy the 97$ product, I get $50 in my affiliate account when I purchase it.
This means I got a HUGE discount, and you lost one nice sale.
Just because I am an affiliate who noticed a link that had not been cloaked.

So in other words, you can only benefit from cloaking your links.

Now, how to actually cloak those links ?
For the method I am about to show you, you will need your own domain name and hosting account.

(if you don’t have a domain/hosting, I suggest you use something like tinyurl.com)

Let’s use my website for this example.. And I will use the Micro Niche Finder keyword tool as my product. (by the way; nothing compares to this tool!)

My affiliate link, which is this :
http://loginfo.kickbutt.hop.clickbank.net
has been transformed into this :
http://JeffreyMireault.com/keyword-tool/

but they are both sending my visitors to the same page.

How did I do that ?

1. Create a new folder in your domain. Mine was “keyword-tool”. (I suggest you name your folder according to a keyword you want to rank for)
2. Create a file into that folder : index.php
3. Add this text into the php file :

<#?php
header( 'Location: http://loginfo.kickbutt.hop.clickbank.net' ) ;
?>

4. Save your file.
5. Enjoy !

(IMPORTANT : in the coding I have given you, you can see a # at the beginning. For the code to work, you want to DELETE this #, and replace the address with your affiliate link.)

and that’s it ! Since the file is named index.php you can use

http://JeffreyMireault.com/keyword-tool/

instead of

http://JeffreyMireault.com/keyword-tool/index.php

Si if you have any questions or comment, don’t hesitate to let me know !

Until next time,
Keep Smiling

Jeffrey

I really appreciate that you keep coming back to my site. Without regular visitors like you, all that work would be worthless ! This motivates me to keep searching for the best information to share.. So if you have any questions, feel free to email me. :)