Is it a must to cloak your affiliate link? I have read a lot of articles about this that it can make you lost your sale if you don't cloak your affiliate link. What is the best software/program to do this?
Thanks! Your email looks familar to me. I think you became one of my referrals before in FLR if I am not mistaken...
You can use simply cloaking, like TinyURL or Cloakreferer, or you can use HTML or PHP cloaking which looks more professional. You can read more about HTML and PHP cloaking here(number 2) > http://www.clickbankbusinessguide.com/2008/03/clickbank-faq-affiliate-tools.html
Thanks! But it still is in the address bar if you click on it. I am looking for a cloaking link that it will actually hide your clickbank nickname/id in the address bar. Is there such? Maybe those are the ones that are not free.
Not worth it. The only purpose for cloaking a link is if you're doing so to track your clicks. If you promote in the IM niche then the chances are that the potential customer will be savvy enough to use their own aff link, so it's a waste of time. If you're outside of the IM niche, they probably won't have a clue. Use cloaking when combined with tracking - yes, but don't feel you have to cloak. Marcus
I agree with double trouble, Most average consumers could care less about your hoplink, however it's impossible to stop losing sales from other marketers at clickbank. Even if you cloak the link, hide it behind a php re-direct it doesn't matter You can be at a page see the famous clickbank order page, jump out jump back in with your own hop, and buy the item at a discount, and there's nothing the last affiliate you went through to the page with can do to stop it. Troy
GC Affiliate Cloaker is the easiest of all the ones I've tried. Also, people emphasize "stealing sales" too much. I mean, it's fair playing ground, you unintentionally do it all the time too.
I have a free link cloaker that I give away. You can check it out in my sig. This is what it does: Hide your ugly affiliate links and boost your click through rate by at least 200% Protect your affiliate links and keep your hard earned commissions from being stolen from the nasty affiliate thieves Redirect your cloaked links to any site of your choice so that others won't even notice it's an affiliate link (and you still credited for your commissions!) Give you the ability to bypass merchant's squeeze pages and send your prospects directly to their sales pages or even the order page Provide you the luxury of linking to even your own sale pages that you've created or other marketing materials in the event your merchants' sales pages are of inferior quality Skyrocket your affiliate commissions and elevate you to the super affiliates status!
Unless you are promoting products to affiliates, marketing people etc, generally you do not need to cloak your affiliate links. Ordinary people may not have knowledge of affiliate links. So, if you are promoting health and fitness, fun and entertainment, home and family, computing and internet, sports, etc, you may not bother cloaking links.
This is how i cloak: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> <html> <head> <title>Digicamcash - Learn how to submit your photos online for cash</title> </head> <frameset rows="100%,*" border="0"> <frame src="http://YOURID.digicamera.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=digicamera" frameborder="0" /> <frame frameborder="0" noresize /> </frameset> <!-- pageok --> <!-- 06 --> <!-- 7.0--> </html> Code (markup):
I ran a test on one of my websites with 2 different clickbank nicknames. One was similar to my domain name and the other wasn't. The nickname similar to my domain name made ~40% more sales; however, when I cloaked the link it was low 30% increase. Tests ran for a month each. I think you really have to think about who your customer is and how internet savvy they are. If you're in the IM niche you're going to lose sales to affiliates who use their own id to buy; however, in a less savvy niche it matters less. There ARE people who look at the bottom left to see where a link takes them and my theory is a redirect makes them distrust you because you lied to them about where you were taking them. You could use a javascript to cloak the display, but that's time consuming and doesn't work with articles etc. My 0.02
Kind of off topic but you can also link direct to the payment page. I've had great success with this technique as it gives my site a lot more authority and the visitor gets the impression that my website is the original seller.
http://YourClickbankUsername.wplcloak.hop.clickbank.net I believe it's only for wordpress. Came out a couple weeks ago.