It will work yes, however it is possible for you to get linkjacked. In other words another affiliate can easily substitute your hop for his hop or just plain remove it where either way you get no credit for the sale.

What I do and have been doing for 10 years now is to use a simple script that is executed when they click the link to get to the sales page, it will leave the originating URL within the URL bar of the user's browser so that not only can they not change the link, they would not even know the URL of the sales page to apply it to even if they could.

It is quite a beautiful thing if you ask me

Search around and I am sure you will find something similar.

You should use proper tracking to optimize your funnel, and the tracker should be able to provide you with cloaked links, so this would do what Kent said above.

I use ClickMagick for tracking, as it integrates with clickbank easily.

It may not be the best tool for tracking keywords, if you use search engine ads like bing or adwords. There are better tools for trackiing this kind of traffic. I'd recommend you take a good look round at different trackers and which one fits best.

Look at voluume, prosper202, tracking desk (has free option), ClickMagick
these are the oney I can think of at once