Are You Cloaking Your Affiliate Links?

If you are a internet home business owner you are probably a member of several affiliate programs.You work hard to promote your affiliate programs but you are not earning as much as you think, you might actually be losing over 50% of your sales because your affiliate links are not cloaked.Cloaking is a way to protect your affiliate link so no one can steal your commissions.There are many ways of protecting the links, like making hidden redirect pages.

If you have a lot of unprotected affiliate links on your website you will probably not get too many sales, because people are vary of clicking these long ugly affiliate links with all the funny numbers and signs on them and a large portion of your commissions are probably getting robbed. Also, a protected link looks much nicer too.

An normal affiliate link looks usually something like this:

http://www.affiliatelink.com/?ref=77383393

but when it is cloaked it looks something like this:

http://www.mydomain.com/recommends/affiliateprogram

Cloaking by setting up hidden redirect pages for all your affiliate programs can be quite difficult.You need to create a php-file that contains your affiliate link and some additional code which you save and upload with your ftp-program to your server.

For more information on how to make a php-file cloaking, there is a website called Essential Keystrokes that has a really good explanation on how to make a redirect for affiliate links.

I like things that are simple and work without hassle, so I´m using a free cloaking tool called MyLinkGuard.I find it very easy to use and I recommend you download it and try it out and see for your self.