Link Cloaking and Link Tracking - How Does it Work?
Tuesday, April 24, 2012 at 9:57PM 
Simply put, link cloaking is the practice of displaying an internal link to a visitor on your site, when in actual fact they're looking at an external link to a product on a 3rd party website. Cloaking the link certainly protects the fact that you are an affiliate marketer, but why do this if you have nothing to hide? Well, a lot of people actually view affiliate marketing with suspicion, despite the fact that you may have pointed them to a truly incredible product!
It’s a solid gold fact that customers are more likely to purchase a product if they feel they can buy into the integrity of the person recommending it. If they feel a product is being pushed merely to earn commission, then not only will credibility be lost, but the sale along with it!
More Problems that Link Cloaking Solves
With link cloaking the obvious affiliate link is disguised, so that to a casual observer it will appear to be an internal link. For example, to hover over, or to click on this link, you would think it goes to another page on my site, however this link actually takes you through to a recommended product on a 3rd party website. Not only is this cleaner to look at, but it's also more trustworthy than the obvious affiliate link which looks nasty and can confuse and even unnerve people when they don't quite understand what they've clicked on.
Another quite scary but very real problem that link cloaking solves is “affiliate hijacking”. Sounds dangerous? It is! Your rightful commissions can be stolen by an unscrupulous affiliate who replaces your link with his own. By using this simple technique, the unscrupulous affiliate directs the commission that should have come to you, to go to him instead. Link cloaking protects your affiliate code from being replaced, which in real terms means you’ll actually get those hard earned commissions that are due to you.
Link Tracking Can Boost Your Income
Link cloaking isn't just about creating trust whilst fending off the hackers. Link cloaking also allows for link tracking which helps you gather specific data from all your affiliate sales about where your revenues are coming from. This is really useful if you are promoting the same product via different sources such as email and/or several web sites. This is important because if you’re unable to identify where the major portion of your income is coming from, you can also lose out on an opportunity to enhance income from that source.
Select a Reliable and Secure Link Cloaking Product
Two reliable and secure link cloaking and link tracking products that I swear by are pretty link for Word press and LinkTrackr. Pretty link lite is a Word press plug-in that's free to use with any Word press based website. You can also upgrade to pro for a one off payment of $37 which is worth every cent for the heaps of extra benefits that are included. LinkTrackr on the other hand is a web based solution that doesn’t require any form of hosting (unlike many other link cloaking products out there!). It also allows you to cloak and track your links on any and all of your affiliate web sites, not just your Word press sites.
To learn more about link tracking and link cloaking become a member today, it's free, requires only your name and email address, and you’ll receive FIVE very EXCLUSIVE Member Benefits absolutely FREE!
Paul Graham
Marketer Trade Secrets.com
Become a member today it’s FREE and receive five VERY EXCLUSIVE member benefits
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