Questions about Affiliate Link

Answer to first question:-

The URL you saw after redirection may contain your affiliate id
or not.when it contains the affiliate id it will show it as
hop=affiliateid after the sitename. When it does not contain
your affiliate id it will still register your id and it will also
track it, but in this case it is just that it does not show
the id on the address bar.

Answer to second question:-

You can use a URL shortener or use other technique to hide
your affiliate link (and it is advisable to do that), but
remember that those who benefit from link replacing are only
other clickbank affiliates. There are billions of people who surf
the internet who are not affiliates (marketers) themselves,
so you get my point? Also clickbank has implemented rules
like CDR and dormant account where there are certain terms
that should be first met,before an affiliate get paid. So it is not
something that any affiliate who is replacing his/her id with the
original affiliate's id, is going the take the advantage.

your affilaite URL will not show in the bar when you go to it, rather the vendors website. don't worry, your stats will still track.

So now you know how that hoplinks work but my advice to you second question is never use url shortners. As they are not reliable and people don't trust them these days. Instead buy a domain name and forward it to your affiliate link. It will increase click rates.

If you want to test Clickbank tracking, click through your hoplink and go onto the vendors page. Click the order button and at the bottom of the clickbank order form it has the referring affiliate's ID - this is a really good way to know that it's working.

As for disguising your URL, if you use Wordpress I really recommend the free version of the Pretty Link plugin. It does it for you and it looks like any other link on your site, so more trustworthy to visitors than a third party link.

No. As mentioned above (I think), you need to test it by looking at the bottom of the order-page, not at the sales page.

This advice includes two mistakes, in my opinion.

First, it makes no sense at all to use services like bit.ly (and especially bit.ly itself) for all the reasons explained in this post.

Secondly, concealing your affiliate-link (though it's a good thing to do) isn't about preventing people from changing your affiliate ID to theirs. If they're going to do that, they're going to do it however you conceal your link, because they're going to see from the order-page (if not from the sales page) that it's a Clickbank product, and if they're already an affiliate, then whatever you do with your link, it's perhaps naive to imagine that you'll be earning a commission on that sale ... and anyway you certainly won't be increasing your chances of that by concealing your link! If they're not already an affiliate, then Clickbank's "customer distribution requirement" will serve its purpose and protect you (by preventing them from being paid their own commission just by becoming an affiliate) so you have nothing to worry about anyway.