Link Cloaking And Affiliate Link Redirecting

Link Cloaking And Affiliate Link Redirecting (Part 1)
Copyright 2009 by Willie Crawford

Let's begin our discussion of link cloaking and
redirecting affiliate links by looking at what
that means, and why you'd want to do it.

First of all, one definition of "cloaking"
is "hiding," which instantly implies something
devious to some. Link cloaking DOES mean hiding,
or changing the link format from the default, for
some reason. In the sense that I'm going to
teach you, there is no evil intent. It's just
one method of increasing your affiliate sales.

Link redirecting involves inserting your
affiliate link into some script, webpage, or
file, and then using a link defined by that
script, webpage or file when you promote the
primary link.

Reasons that you'd want to cloak or redirect
your links include:

1) To protect yourself from affiliate commission
theft. Many affiliates readily recognize a link
for a Clickbank product, for example, and know that
they often only need to insert their ClickBank ID
where yours is in that link to earn the commission
on their own purchase. They jokingly call that
an "instant discount."

Affiliate marketers will often see an affiliate
link, and visit the website looking for a link
to register for the affiliate program, and then
purchase through their own link, robbing the
affiliate, who first made them aware of the
product, of the commission that they rightly
earned.

This is very prevalent, and many product owners
really don't care about the affiliates, so it's
often not prohibited. Those merchants will earn
the same amount regardless of which affiliate
earns the commission.

I refuse to promote most affiliate products that
don't specifically prohibit affiliates purchasing
through their own affiliate links. I also
insist upon that being the policy at companies that
I help run such as http://EasyPushButtonTraffic.com

Clickbank doesn't prohibit affiliates from buying
through their own links, and I actually promote
VERY few products on Clickbank just for that
reason.

2) To shorten and "pretty up" long, clunky
affiliate links.

3) To make the affiliate links less obvious. Some
people do not like the idea of you earning a
commission on products that you recommend. They
often even assume that you recommended the product
ONLY because you earn a commission.

4) To get your email delivered, even if the primary
domain for the affiliate program is blacklisted.
During many product launches, overly-aggressive
affiliates promote so hard that they irritate a
lot of subscribers. Those subscribers often file
spam complaints, even though they subscribed to
the subject newsletters.

When enough spam complaints are received about a
given domain, the ISP's will often blacklist that
domain. At that point, many of the emails that
are sent which contain that domains url will
automatically be deleted. So, you could have
a list of 100,000 and because your email
contains a blacklisted domain, maybe only 10% of
your emails get delivered.

I have a free 52-part email course designed to
train affiliate marketers. It covers this topic
as well as tons of other tips and tactics that
are very effective in selling affiliate products.
The course also included 15 videos showing how
to do things that you need to master to be an
effective affiliate marketer.

You can enroll in that affiliate training free at:
http://WillieCrawford.com/FreeAffiliateTraining/

Ok, this article is getting long enough, so let's
end it for now. Part-2 will get into the
specifics of HOW you redirect or cloak a link.
Be on the lookout for it, and make plans now to
start redirecting or cloaking all of those ugly
affiliate links.

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Willie Crawford is a website traffic generation expert.
He often distributes content (articles, videos, podcasts,
and press releases) to generate highly targeted website
traffic. To do that efficiently he uses the automated
submission service at http://EasyPushButtonTraffic.com