If you run an affiliate business, you will perhaps have heard of link cloaking. Clickbank link cloaking is where you mask a Clickbank link with a much nicer looking one, shortened perhaps. There are many benefits to Clickbank link cloaking, and the biggest, most obvious one is that Clickbank’s links are really u-g-l-y. Their hoplinks look appalling, so it’s very obvious one should mask them. When cloaking your links you gain a number of benefits. One of my favourites include using the masked link to keep control of where it goes. For example, if you send out an email with a ‘Click Here’ button on it, and you tell your customers that it’s a limited time offer, you can cut that link by simply changing it where it redirects.

Clickbank link cloaking can be achieved in a number of ways, and the best and cheapest way is to use a free offer online, especially good are the ‘shortening’ services. Have you ever used ‘Twitter’? If you have, then you’ll know that entering a URL will result in it being ‘shortened’. This is an example of a masked URL. However, in the case of Twitter it’s not because people want to hide where the link is going, but because they want to make it shorter. However, these services work fine for our purposes. One of my old favourites was TinyURL, but this service has been far beaten by bit.ly. It’s used extensively with Twitter, and generates tiny URLs for you. However, that’s not the main reason this is a good one, and it’s purely because bit.ly has link tracking. For this feature to work properly, you’ll first need to make an account, as this will mean your links are generated under your account. Tracking means you don’t just mask the link, you can see how many are clicking on it, this is vital for a winning campaign.

Clickbank link cloaking can also be done with a bit of simple HTML. This also means you can create better ‘call to action’ buttons, meaning you’ll get more clicks. Simply perform a search for ‘html link’ and follow the instructions at the first site in the listings. Remember though to use a tool like TinyURL and bit.ly to mask the link first, as people will still be able to see where your HTML link is heading. There are also a number of Clickbank link cloaking tools out there under paid membership. If you are considering one of these, make sure you look around to see if the price is right for what they are offering, and consider adding it to a package if it’s going to the worth it. An example of a link tracking tool is ‘My-Linker’ with the Wealthy Affiliate package.

If you don’t make many affiliate sales even you have done a good job, probably someone is changing your affiliate ID to their own ID. It could be also their spyware doing it. The point is that you make sales, but someone steals your commissions. The solution to this problem is cloaking your links. Cloaking links means to redirect from your website and hiding your affiliate ID. Cloaking your links will prevent someone from stealing your affiliate commissions. Even if you make many sales you should still cloak your affiliate links, because you might be losing some sales. Affiliate links should be always cloaked. According to some SEO experts, affiliate cloaking is also good for Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
There are many cloaking services online, but most of them can mess up the tracking cookies, and prevent you from getting credit for your sales. You should only use cloaking services that were designed for affiliate marketers. Link shortening services and redirection services like tinyurl and Bit.Ly can also mess up your affiliate links. So, what is the best solution? The best solution is to have a link cloaker on your own site. If you aren’t a programmer you need to find a good cloaking service that will do the job for you. Below there are some links to a free report Cloak and Dagger Affiliate Secrets which will teach everything you need to know about cloaking, and it will also tell you about the best cloaking services.