Do you need to cloak your affiliate links?

I just stick them through a tinyURL :-)

Yes we need it. Simple PHP scripts will do that.

I also use Bit.ly. Free to set up an account and it tracks clicks.

Not many affiliate programs will allow
this but if you're selling a product
for a company using an advanced system,
you can redirect to a page on your own
site and still see the affiliate tracking
cookie/ip.

This takes more effort than slapping a
simple redirect on your site but it can
be a VERY powerful strategy for building
affiliate sales.

For example, lets' say your website is
coolstuffreviews.com and you want
to do a review on a product called "widget".

All you would do is take your link and point it
at the page coolstuffreviews.com/wideget-review.html
but this would really be a redirect to your
affiliate link.

But now your affiliate link points the person back to
a very similar page like:

coolstuffreviews.com/widget-reviews.html

Now you have a cloaked link, a customer that
is being tracked, and increased credibility on
your site as the person was not simply redirected
to a sales page.

Confused yet?

Just think about how this will work ...it's VERY
powerful. The key is that this will only work with
some affiliate programs / software.

My original answer was going to be that if the product is in the IM niche, I would definitely use a link cloaker. Otherwise I don't(or didn't) think it matters. I know people who make 5 figures a year, sometimes a month, that don't use link cloaking.

In the IM niche offer a bonus if you care about the sale then you can and probably should flaunt the fact that they have to use that specific link.

I usually make a redirect from the site that goes to the affiliate link. You don't have to do it, but people are more likely to click it if they see it from the domain that they are on.

I put together a site that helps you cloak your affiliate links. It hides the links from spiders by encoding them with javascript. All you need to do is fill out the form, click the generate cloaked page, and copy/paste the code into a file on your site such as link1.html If you have any questions let me know.

Here is the link: Affiliate Link Cloaker | Free Stealth Cloaker

base64 encoding an iframe loading an affilaite link and doing a 1 second meta refresh is not stealth, is highly unreliable, and is only suitable for static sites.

You know it's funny - everyone USED to say you needed to, because "no customer wants to click an ugly affiliate URL."

It was a way to "hide" the affiliate relationship. That was never *actually* OK legally, but now with the re-clarified FTC info that came out last year, you need to be explicit ANYWAY.

Also, since those days, the proliferation of links filtered through innumerable other link-masking services has made it so the URL of the link being clicked isn't as much of an alert for the websurfer at large.

So if you're NOT in the IM niche, your prospects won't understand the affiliate URL anyway, and it's no longer something they are unused to encountering. Gibberish URLs outweigh normal ones now. And you can't legally hide your relationship anyways, so...

And if you ARE in the IM niche, we ALL know what affiliate links are. You're not "tricking" anyone by cloaking it.

Plus, we cloak links, but then tell our email sending software to track, and it changes it anyways. At least mine does. So unless your URL means something and you include the URL itself in the copy, the cloaking doesn't even happen in a helpful way except for adding yet ANOTHER bounce in that link.

So is the extra work of cloaking EVER worth it? Depends. Here are a FEW reasons I can think of why cloaking could still be beneficial.

1. I cloak links through Pretty Links on my blog, just to centrally manage them AND track the click counts.

2. Link branding can be something you want to do IF you use the domain as the URL. I've seen some guys have domains JUST for links like Jeff Johnson's "jjlikes" domain. There's also known benefit in SEO if people link to your domain with a keyworded URL, so bouncing your aff links through your home domain MAY have added benefit there.

3. Shortening can be a concern - there's already plenty of solutions for that, if you need a shorter link - do it. If you're on Wordpress, you can get a plugin that will do a good job with giving you your own shortener - (unless you have a really long domain).

So, I "cloak" but not for the reasons most people say to - I do it for tracking and management purposes. I do it to control my links better, not to mask them or make them look pretty (regardless of the name of the plugin).

So anyways, maybe not what you were looking for, but that's what I got.

There are a ton o other reasons to cloak in some way... maybe I should write a full list

Colin I just did a 30 minute brain dump though I am sure I missed a few
http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...oak-links.html