I have been reading a bunch about link cloaking and I understand the concept but I'm wondering if its really worth all of the trouble. I understand that without cloaking people can copy and paste the url and delete your affiliate information. But come on how many people will really do that and those people that do decide to do it will they really buy the product? Most people that are looking to make a purchase are general users who will click on your links and buy the product. Its only the other affiliates who know the system who can change the links and they chances of them buying the product are very limited. Is there something else that I'm missing in this cloaking issue that would make me need to spend an extra 10 mins setting up iframe redirect pages or tiny urls?
I think it depends on your business model, but I'd definitely use it since the benefits out weight the liabilities of not doing it. First, it makes your link look clean. Second, you can build a directory on your site to put all these redirect in. It may not sound like a big deal if you just have one landing page, but if you put the link on a 100 pages, it's a pain in the ass to change them all. I was digging through some of the old affiliate links I used when I first started. Guess what? I found two sites that are no longer active. If I had that link on a 100 pages, I'd have to spend time going back and finding something else to put in it. Basically if you set up this central directory of redirects, if a site doesn't work anymore, you just change the cloaking/redirect and it is instantly changed on hundreds of pages.
10 mins setting up iframe redirect pages or tiny urls? Try about 1 minute doing a 301 redirect in htaccess. It also makes editing the affiliate link easier because the affiliate link is at one location.
If another affiliate wants to buy a product that they found via your website, they can just swap your Clickbank ID for theirs, and that way they pay next to nothing for the product, and you get zilch.
Don't be lazy and just cloak it. Maybe I should start an ebook about why is it important to cloak your clickbank affiliate url and sell it on CB. That should sell really well
Other than the tinyurl method I've read about, where can I find the easiest to follow and best method of cloaking the links from my site?
If you have your own hosting, you can do HTML or PHP redirect. Just Google it, and you will find out how to do it. If you want something free, then apart from TinyURL, you can also try Cloak Referer.
You would be surprised at people who do anything to AVOID giving people a commission when they embark upon a product they want to purchase. I don't know why that is, but people do that. And yes, it makes the link look cleaner, almost as if whatever your promoting belongs to your site.
I still don't understand the point of doing that. Why wouldn't they just create their own affiliate link, click it and get the commission?
if you're using wordpress.org for your blog, wp_affiliate is a nice easy way to do it ... and totally agree with suppers commments ... being able to fix all your links in one place rather than 100 is a huge benefit