Link Cloaking and Affiliate Marketing

Link cloaking is often connected to affiliate marketing. And with good reason, too-link cloaking is one of many tools affiliate marketing practitioners use to entice visitors to visit affiliate sites. For those who are not familiar, affiliate marketing is a practice where one is rewarded for forwarding a visitor (to potential customer) to a particular site. At its simplest, affiliate marketing has three steps-a customer goes to the affiliate, the affiliate directs the customer to the partner (the seller), and the partner compensates the affiliate for directing the customer. The idea here is, with several affiliates, the partner has a higher chance of making a sale. Besides from techniques such as article marketing (using articles to promote the product of a partner), link cloaking is one of the more effective techniques available to affiliates today.

But why is this so? What exactly is link cloaking and how does it work to the affiliate’s advantage?

Link cloaking is also known URL redirection or web forwarding, where one assigns another URL to a particular site besides its original address. When one clicks this URL redirect, the visitor is sent to the original address. Webmasters use this to get more visitors in various ways. For instance, a webmaster has a site with a terribly long address. This technique can be used so the site will have an alternate URL, preferably a shorter, more appealing one. It can also be used to take advantage of misspellings when inputting URL address. For instance, a popular misspelling of another website is webstie.com (as supposed to website.com). The webmaster will use the misspelling as a redirect to send visitors to his site instead.

These two examples work for affiliates too. But link cloaking as used by affiliate marketers are often used in conjunction with how visitors feel and respond to affiliate links. This is because many visitors and Internet users see affiliate links as a “third party.” They know, then, that everything on the affiliate’s site was simply a ploy to redirect the user to the site of partner. When a visitor see a link on the affiliate site pointing to another site, he or she already knows what’s up, making a sale (more so making the visitor at least visit the partner’s site) less likely.

However, when the affiliate link is cloaked to make it seem as if the partner’s site is not a third party, the objective of the marketer becomes easier to fulfill. With link cloaking, the affiliate can simply hide the URL of the affiliate link to make it look like it is still part of the affiliate’s website. Affiliate links are not exactly the most enticing URL addresses. They are easy to detect because of their form (it usually has affiliate IDs attached to it, and it is also very long). When one employs link cloaking, he can easily post the URL redirect because the link will be more pleasant-and it won’t look like a hard sell. People are always wary of sale sites; link cloaking increases the likelihood that people will visit your affiliate link. Also, link cloaking prevents affiliate “snippers” from earning from the work of others.