Affiliate Link Cloaking

June 8, 2008

In the world of affiliate marketing where you refer somebody to a product through an affiliate link, and if they make a purchase you get paid commission, common affiliate revenue theft occurs.

Affiliate revenue theft, how is this so?

Well here’s the thing, people started to catch on to affiliate marketing and started to become aware of it, and its “affiliate links”.

For some reason people rather pay the owner of the product directly then let someone else earn a profit from it as well (like it makes a difference . . . go figure). Even after a well thought out review was written by the person the product was recommended by.

This person helps you decide if you’re going to buy something or not, and you decide to bypass their affiliate link and give the money straight to the owner of the product.

Why? Who knows?

You’re not giving any more money up. It’s the same thing. My way of looking at it is, why feed one mouth when you can feed two? So yes I click and make purchases through affiliate links because it’s the same either way.

The same amount of money is going to be spent.

Well it just so happens not everyone thinks the same way, so people began to anchor text their links instead (aka make the link a descriptive text), in effect hiding the URL and not displaying it directly.

This didn’t work very long.

What happened?

People started to catch on to another flaw: the status bar, and it’s at the bottom left hand corner of you browser’s window.

Every time you hover your mouse over a link the URL of such link will be shown in the status bar revealing your affiliate link. Again affiliate sales begin to be cut due to the bypassing of affiliate links.

What was the solution?

Well some savvy programmers came up with something called a link cloaker.

This “link cloaker” lets you “anchor text” your affiliate link, and makes sure it doesn’t show up in the status bar whatsoever. This will make sure that your affiliate sales continue to flow in and that nobody is bypassing your affiliate links.

But there’s a catch

I wouldn’t recommend you use this if you’re serious about the site you’re using it on. By “cloaking” links on your site, your site can lose its credibility. It is non user-friendly to have readers click onto the unknown.

If you’re going to use it remember it can damage your credibility.

Proceed at your own will . . .

To use this tool just click on this link Affiliate Link Cloaker.