I'm new to affialite marketing, and have set myself up with a clickbank account. I've read on various web sites about affiliate marketing that it's a good idea to 'hide' your affiliate url so people can't tell that it is an affiliate url. I don't own a web page/site, so am using tinyurl to do this in articles. Do people find this to be necessary? Helpful in generating sales?
It's a good idea to hide your affiliate link, tinyurl will do the job, it might make a minor difference in the sales you generate.. but nothing major.
Well most article sites don't let you have affiliate links in the posts anyway... but I would try to cloak it.
Hiding helps a lot, since it cleans up the link. I'd keep the masking "in house", so you at least control it.
Don't use tinyurl though because it really doesn't look good. I use Ninja Link Cloaker and it's very good - link cloaked in a few seconds. I'm pretty sure the same thing can be done for free though. Actually one I've heard of (but not tried) is http://www.freelinkcloaker.com, I think it's supposed to be quite good.
IMO, you definitely don't have to pay for link cloaking, you have so many free services, you have to be really ignorant to pay for your link to be cloaked