Want to make passive income through the internet? Try affiliate marketing. It’s one of the best ways anyone can make money online.
You just need to recommend other people's products and the income will roll in. If the product you promote has a recurring subscription feature, you can earn commissions for life (unless the customer cancels the subscription).
You can read the basics of affiliate marketing here .
But affiliate marketing is not as easy as I said. A lot of people struggle in this field. That’s why the competition is so fierce.
It’s no surprise, then, that the market is rife with scammers who come up with many underhanded tactics to try to defraud innocent marketers of their hard-earned commissions.
Commission theft usually involves dishonest companies setting up malware in people's web browsers that replaces our unique affiliate links with their links, thereby directing our commissions to these hackers.
The good news is that a defensive weapon has been developed:
- Link hidden.
What is link cloaking?
Link cloaking is the act of shortening unsightly affiliate links to get higher click-through rates and track which users click on them.
After hiding the link, redirection is performed so that the marketer’s commission is well protected.
Affiliate links are often long, hard to remember, and will display the affiliate ID:
- *http://www.vendor.com/products/?product_id=111&affiliate=111*
You can see how ugly and confusing the link above is. Link cloaking can help shorten this ugly link and turn it into a branded URL:
- http://www.yoursite.com/refer/productname
Notice how the second link looks better, more organized, and branded. Rather than using a direct affiliate link, use cloaking to make it look more professional.
Why You Should Always Cloak Your Links
Here are the main reasons why it is recommended to cloak your affiliate links.
1. Reduced commission losses:
Many affiliate marketing networks frequently warn their users to beware of malware that may replace one affiliate link with another in an attempt to steal commissions.
The truth is, there’s nothing you can do about it, except working with some networks that don’t encourage such affiliates (like Commission Junction and ShareASale).
Someone could visit a product page and replace your affiliate link in the address bar with theirs. Affiliate sites like ClickBank, which allow users to purchase through their links, are known for this unsavory behavior. If you are one of these affiliate sites, the only way to prevent this is to hide your affiliate links.
There are also some consumers who, once they realize they are about to click on an affiliate link, will simply skip the affiliate section and go directly to the main site to make their purchase. I call these people "bypassers." The best way to prevent this is, as you guessed it, to hide the link.
2. Hiding helps tracking:
You know how important it is to track all metrics on your website, including affiliate clicks. Some link cloaking plugins are great at this. They track clicks on all your affiliate links, helping you determine which posts, pages, or parts of your blog layout bring in the most commissions.
3. Increase Click-Through Rate (CTR):
As I mentioned before, affiliate links are often ugly and offensive.
Poor appearance is enough to put off a lot of people. By making them look more presentable and highlighting your site’s branding, people will be more inclined to click.
4. Improve email deliverability:
Adding affiliate links in emails often triggers spam filters, which can cause your emails to be blacklisted. If you include affiliate links in your email marketing campaigns, it is recommended that you hide them.
5. Easy Link Management:
If your affiliate network changes the links to their products or decides to shut down their business, it will be a very tedious task to replace all the affiliate links.
Luckily, using a simple WordPress link cloaking plugin can make this process a breeze. You simply change the link in one place and it will automatically be modified everywhere. Easy, right?
6. Defeat ad blockers:
There is a browser extension called AdBlock Plus that blocks internet users from seeing ads. Many of your users may be using this extension on their browsers.
Ad blockers check affiliate links to determine if the image is an ad banner. Hiding the link can often allow the banner to be displayed (provided it is not a hotlink from the merchant's domain).
7. Affiliate links that are easily rejected:
Google generally frowns upon the use of do-follow affiliate links, which may cause them to penalize your blog, thus affecting your search rankings.
Manually adding the rel=nofollow attribute every time you create an affiliate link can be time-consuming. With a link cloaking plugin, this process becomes easy.
The good thing is, once you cloak your affiliate link, you can use that link over and over again in your blog posts and it will still be cloaked.
How to Cloak Affiliate Links (Free WordPress Plugin)
There are many plugins available on the internet today that can help you cloak your affiliate links. The most popular plugins include
Pretty Link Lite is a free WordPress link cloaking plugin that makes it easy to cloak links. It helps you manage affiliate links easily. With this plugin, you can also automatically add no-follow tags to affiliate links, shorten links, and do proper redirects.
This is an easy to use link cloaking plugin for affiliate marketers. It allows you to cloak links and add and manage all your affiliate links on one control panel.
3. Geni.us
You can also use a service like Geni.us which costs around $9 per month and offers a lot of advanced features like geo-based redirects. I use it to manage my Amazon affiliate links and I highly recommend it to you too.
in conclusion
Some people might consider cloaking links a deceptive practice, but I don’t. It all depends on your perspective and approach.
I would even go so far as to say that hiding affiliate links is more honest than leaving them exposed.
But if you’re nervous about doing this, there are things you can do to make sure you don’t disappoint your readers.
Have a complete affiliate disclosure policy on your website that discloses all of your affiliate and linking practices.
I am not against using cloaked links because I know how important this process is for affiliate marketers.
If you are serious about affiliate marketing and want to protect your commissions, then I strongly recommend that you make a habit of always hiding your affiliate links. This will save you a lot of headaches in the end.
What do you think about link cloaking? Do you think it’s deceptive? What plugins do you use to manage cloaked links? Let me know in the comments below!
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Disclosure: Some of the links in this article contain affiliate links, which means we may earn a commission if you click through to visit us, at no extra cost to you. See how SidelinePlay is funded, why it’s important, and how you can support us.
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