Cloaknig

hi friends,

can someone please explain what is my interest when hiding from clickbank
my Keyword source through cloaking ?

I will be happy to hear the real reason

thanks an have a great weekend

 

By cloaking your are hiding your affiliate link and protecting it from those who steal commissions.

Reasons why to do it:

1. Original affiliate link looks ugly and suspicious
2. Commissions thieves won't be able to steal your commissions (at least, it will much more difficult)
3. Any advanced marketer recommends to cloak links. Even Clickbank itself recommend that.

Here, look:

http://www.clickbank.com/affiliate_tools.html#Affiliate_Tools_2

 

I do it for a few reasons.
The first is to give the link a nice friendly feel.

domain.com/product/

is a lot better than

blah.hop.clickbank....

I also do it because I can create a central location of links.

So if I have a 1000 pages on my site and one of my affiliates decides no longer to sell. I can just change the cloak url to forward to another one. Bam, I don't have to update a 1000 pages.

 

If the visitor is a genuine buyer then he wont mind if it is an affiliate link. But domain.com/product always looks good when compared to the hop link.

 

Its basically a way to protect your affiliate commissions from others who attempt to steal your hard work.

 

People like to steal your commissions, cloaking your link stops that from happening.

 

Also, if you put the links in something like a /recommends/product/ type structure, you'd put in your robots.txt to tell the search engine bots not to spider the /recommends directory. This makes google like you more, lol, they're not too fond of affiliate sites.

 

Can you explain how this stealing happens ?

 

Ok guys thanks for the answers
my next question is
How am I doing it? (Cloaking) is there a special tool that does it
For me?
One more thing...
Whether the cloaking can confuse clickbank about the seller sources? ( me)

 

Not many people in niches CARE at all how the link looks...

You can use "<a href="afflink">www.site.com</a> and people will think it's the real link... anyway, I*ve created a video and tool at www.affiliatecloakmagic.com which cloaks stuff

- Chris

 

I'd like to know how "stealing commissions" works too.

 

I tried to use tinyurl and when the page loaded, there was my ID....so it accomplished nothing

 

you can use PHP redirects to clean up your aff link and hide it from visitors.

I figured out the PHP redirects from here: http://studge.com/hiding-links-with-php-and-counting-clicks-with-mysql

I've never experienced the theft, but some spyware(parasiteware) can rewrite aff links if it detects them. Changes your ID to someone elses. A user clicks your link on your page, but when they reach merchant its under someone elses affiliate ID. They get credit for the sale. You don't.

 

thanks...I'll check it out