How to cloak your affiliate links to increase your click conversion
As an affiliate marketer, I have to promote merchants and their services. One of the most effective and common form of promotion is through a simple text link (nowadays people will argue that video ads are better though) which will bring the readers to their respective sites.
The far majority of people will not like to click on a link that looks like this – http://xxx.com/snfnfERRER%^^&&$#@1@#$.
It looks way too ugly (some say shitty!) and seems like it is going to stretch all the way to the moon! You absolutely do not want a link to be looking like that. What we want is a nice functional link that will get the click.
Before I go on, let me address one issue first, which is that on ethics.
There are some who feel that cloaking is unethical, on the lack of transparency ground. To be very honest, I feel otherwise.
Marketing is all about optimizing your settings to achieve the maximum possible conversion. There is no obvious malicious intent to cheat or lie here when we cloak. The person that clicks the link will always be sent to the same destination, be it cloaked or not.
Furthermore, the price of the product or service remains the same, regardless of the whether person goes to the merchant directly or through the affiliate link. In fact, many affiliates offer rebates of bonuses for people to click on their link. They end up getting a better deal!
If the product being recommended is a good one (which should always be the priority for affiliate marketers), both sides benefit, and it will be a win-win situation. Everyone is happy and everyone benefits!
Cloaking is done also for practical reasons. Firstly, very long URL tends to be cut off by the browser, resulting in an error page. A nice short cloaked link will do just well to lead the person to where you want it to be.
Secondly, cloaking helps to prevent unscrupulous scums, who go around replacing other people’s affiliate’s ID in the link with their own, from stealing.
Ok now with that issue out of the way, let’s talk about how to go about cloaking a link.
Actually there are quite a few softwares that can a proper cloaking job for you. There are also other methods such as using TinyURL or NameStick (a pretty cool cloaking solution endorsed by the famous marketer, Yanik Silver, no less).
Allow me to show you a simple, fast and good way to cloak a link – for FREE.
1. First, as an example, let say I want to promote ‘VeryWonderfulProduct’. I will use a FTP software to create a folder named ‘VeryWonderfulProduct’ in my public root directory of my site. So the final link will be something like http://yourdomainname/VeryWonderfulProduct.
2. Next, I will create a html file using any HTML editor (download a free one at
–> <meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0;url=YourAffiliateLinkGoesHere“>
Save and rename the file as ‘index.html’.
3. Upload the file into the ‘VeryWonderfulProduct’ folder in your public directory, and there you have it, a fully functional cloaked link instead of an ugly link. With the link cloaked in this manner, it also helps to brand your site. The whole process takes only about two minutes of your time at the very most. Of course, there might be better ways out there, but so far, the method I’ve highlighted has served me quite well, therefore I’ll be sticking with it for a while.
Be sure to incorporate the affiliate link in such a way that it flows naturally as part of the content. Importantly, have good useful valuable content on to gain the trust of your readers. You can be sure that your click conversion is going to see a significant improvement after this!
P.S If you have read until this point, it means that the title of this article has probably caught your attention to prompt you to click in. So there you go – the title is important as well! Do bear that in mind!
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