How You Can Easily Cloak Your Affiliate Links
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Link cloaking is a critical aspect of affiliate marketing. In summary, link cloaking is an option to protect your affiliate commissions from being ripped off. It’s not completely foolproof. Savy thieves who are well-educated link codes can still decode to steal your commission.
Most people won’t go that far, so cloaking your links will protect most commissions. How do people steal affiliate commissions? If you have ever hovered over a link, you immediately know the link is obviously affiliate link?
Many people type in the parent domain instead of clicking the link as a way of making sure the owner of the site gets paid 100% for the sale. Some people falsely assume that if they buy from an affiliate link, they’ll have to pay more for a commission markup.
Others, do it for a different reason. If you’re promoting a ClickBank product, especially to other marketers, many of them know they can insert their own ClickBank ID and get what’s a 50% or more discount on the product.
This is a different type of affiliate commission theft, because the person doing it steals the affiliate commission, instead of just making sure you don’t get it. Most people don’t do that, of course.
Most people are pretty honest, and don’t mind giving you a little affiliate commission in exchange for recommending a good product to them. But it’s enough of a issue that you need take steps to prevent it.
You can set up your own link cloaking system easily. What you would do is set up a directory on one of your domains. The majority of marketers use the domain of their own name, as in bobsmith.com. They typically have a subdirectory called /recommends/.
Then in that directory, they build a new subdirectory for each product. It would look something like this: http://www.bobsmith.com/recommends/awesomeproductname. In that directory, they place a very simple PHP redirect called index.php.
Whenever they send someone to the above link, the script will redirect to your affiliate link. All you have to do is create a file in Notepad or your favorite HTML editor and name is index.php. Then paste the following information into the file and upload it to your directory:
< ?php
header("location:http://affiliates.programhere.com/5555");
?>
There are numerous link cloaking scripts available. Most of them are relatively simple to install and use. There’s a big advantage to using a script rather than doing it yourself. By using your simple redirect, there isn’t an easy way to check how much traffic you’ve sent to your link.
Most link cloaking scripts let you to add new links very easily within an administrative area, and then each link is tracked so that you can see how much traffic is going through the link. If you use your own file, the only way to tell how much traffic you’ve sent is through your affiliate stats, which may be inaccurate, or through your web server’s stats, which may be clunky to use or hard to understand.
You can do this by using a link cloaking tool, such as Go Try This. This allows you enter the raw affiliate link and name your link whatever you want as an extension of your domain. Then you can measure and track your links' stats to see how the top 10 links are performing using a diagram and bar graph.
Get more quality, unique and clear-cut articles (with simple step by step details, how to's. tips and ideas) related to online homebusiness, internet and affliate marketing. Check out www.homebusinesstalk.biz and www.momsebizblog.blogspot.com
Most people won’t go that far, so cloaking your links will protect most commissions. How do people steal affiliate commissions? If you have ever hovered over a link, you immediately know the link is obviously affiliate link?
Many people type in the parent domain instead of clicking the link as a way of making sure the owner of the site gets paid 100% for the sale. Some people falsely assume that if they buy from an affiliate link, they’ll have to pay more for a commission markup.
Others, do it for a different reason. If you’re promoting a ClickBank product, especially to other marketers, many of them know they can insert their own ClickBank ID and get what’s a 50% or more discount on the product.
This is a different type of affiliate commission theft, because the person doing it steals the affiliate commission, instead of just making sure you don’t get it. Most people don’t do that, of course.
Most people are pretty honest, and don’t mind giving you a little affiliate commission in exchange for recommending a good product to them. But it’s enough of a issue that you need take steps to prevent it.
You can set up your own link cloaking system easily. What you would do is set up a directory on one of your domains. The majority of marketers use the domain of their own name, as in bobsmith.com. They typically have a subdirectory called /recommends/.
Then in that directory, they build a new subdirectory for each product. It would look something like this: http://www.bobsmith.com/recommends/awesomeproductname. In that directory, they place a very simple PHP redirect called index.php.
Whenever they send someone to the above link, the script will redirect to your affiliate link. All you have to do is create a file in Notepad or your favorite HTML editor and name is index.php. Then paste the following information into the file and upload it to your directory:
< ?php
header("location:http://affiliates.programhere.com/5555");
?>
There are numerous link cloaking scripts available. Most of them are relatively simple to install and use. There’s a big advantage to using a script rather than doing it yourself. By using your simple redirect, there isn’t an easy way to check how much traffic you’ve sent to your link.
Most link cloaking scripts let you to add new links very easily within an administrative area, and then each link is tracked so that you can see how much traffic is going through the link. If you use your own file, the only way to tell how much traffic you’ve sent is through your affiliate stats, which may be inaccurate, or through your web server’s stats, which may be clunky to use or hard to understand.
You can do this by using a link cloaking tool, such as Go Try This. This allows you enter the raw affiliate link and name your link whatever you want as an extension of your domain. Then you can measure and track your links' stats to see how the top 10 links are performing using a diagram and bar graph.
Get more quality, unique and clear-cut articles (with simple step by step details, how to's. tips and ideas) related to online homebusiness, internet and affliate marketing. Check out www.homebusinesstalk.biz and www.momsebizblog.blogspot.com