Right now, I'm currently not cloaking any of my CB product links. My conversion rate is OK but i wish it was much better! I used to cloak my links through a blank redirect page and didn't notice much of a difference. So I'm looking for some tips, knowledge, etc. Is it necessary? A special way of doing it? Thanks!
I cloak but I cannot tell the difference in my conversion rate. It looks nicer to the user but I think thats about it.
I always cloak my affiliate links, just to be safe. I used to simply redirect using a blank page but now I use Link Shrinker. It does the same job and much faster.
I don't think Cloaking could be benefecial...as some say that its considered that search engines doesn't like cloaking.
I think the OP is referring to link cloaking, rather than site cloaking (there's a huge difference). Link cloaking just means redirecting all your product links through another URL so that the hoplink isn't immediately viewable in the user's navigation bar. As such, this makes them look cleaner and removes any buyers' hesitation due to a strange URL. In general, I wouldn't say it's a needed step to get customers to buy, but I would say it can be very helpful to track outbound visitors from your site to see whether or not your lander is working well and converting visitors to the merchant site. As far as the whole "OMG I have to cloak my links so other people don't steal my commission", it's pretty much a moot point, since it's not like anyone who can buy it through their own link will be deceived by the time they hit the checkout page, and it's pretty darn unlikely that the general public would take the time to figure out they can save themselves money by signing up, buying through their own link, and then making 4 other sales so they can actually get their check. -T
Telmari is right on. Using cloaked links you can track how many people have clicked on those links and figure out a conversion ratio. If you send people to the pitch page directly its much harder to figure that out.
it is always better to have cloaked link like yourdomain.com/product1/ rather than have something like hxxp://product1/link1?affid=xxxx
I usually like to cloak my links as www.mypage.com/recommends/name/ - the 'recommends' makes it look more reliable in my opinion/
From personal experience, when I started cloaking my links, the conversion seemed to go up. Besides, it looks nicer, and less tacky.
Hi I think cloaked links look much better if your promoting by E.mail and the recipients are fairly savvy. I dont think the average person finding your link, through Google or Yahoo etc. would notice anything different. Good luck Dave
Here is how a lot of folks do it: Lets say your affiliate link is hXXp://www.someproduct.hop.clickbank.net but you would like for it to look like hXXp://yourdomain.com/products/productname.php First open your .htaccess file and enter the following: Redirect /products/productname.php hXXp://www.someproduct.hop.clickbank.net Note that this needs to be all on one line, that is with no breaks. Now when you go to the url hXXp://yourdomain.com/products/productname.php you will automatically be redirected to the affiliate link. With this example it is a good idea to use robots.txt to dissallow /products
Thanks for the info! I thought it would be something like that. I ll try it... Why do i have to dissallow /products in robots.txt?
You do not have to dissallow it, it is just my recommendation so that the search bots do not follow it.
Thanks Colby When you start doing this with multiple links you should keep everything in .htaccess in alphabetical order. That way you will be able to easily finf a redirect later on when you might need to change it. By the way that is another cool thing about this method. If you need to change an affiliate link you only need to change the one entry in your .htaccess instead of wading through multiple pages editing your links. Oh, and I forgot to mention that in the example above you do not have to actually have a folder named /products/ and of course you cannot have an actual file called /products/productname.php You may also want to have these open in a new window (target="_blank") so as not to lose your visitor entirely.