Question: Why would you want to hide your affiliate links? Don’t you want people to click on them?
Answer: I’m not talking about hiding the links themselves. You’re right — we DO want people to click on them. I mean you want to hide their destination. Here’s why:
There are many ways to cloak affiliate links. Some are quite easy, but those methods are also not very difficult for an experienced webmaster to crack. In fact, even the more crafty ways of hiding your link can be bypassed by simply clicking the link to see where it leads. In many cases the destination will clearly give away the affiliate network involved, so a dedicated commission thief can then buy the product using his own affiliate link.
Even if affiliate link theft wasn’t a problem, it would still be worthwhile to hide affiliate links from the other types of people who don’t like to click on them. I have been using an excellent link cloaker for years. In my opinion, it’s the best one available, and it’s FREE! In addition to hiding your affiliate links, it also lets you redirect the person to any page on the destination website that you want — and you’ll still get credit for the sale.
The techies at Link Share advised me not to use it — they maintained that it would cause me to lose my commission. But I showed them proof that my cloaked links were still recognized by their software, so that I still got credit when people clicked them.
Enough said. You can download my favorite link-hiding software for FREE just by clicking here: Link Cloaker. Instructions for installation come with the file itself. For help in using the link cloaker, the instructions here are easy to understand — I rewrote them myself!
I got this wonderful program from IMBuzz Software. If you would like to see all the other software they have available, just click on the banner below.
UPDATE – December 17, 2011: I just posted a new page on my sister site, Professor’s Coding Corner, “Why and How to Cloak Affiliate Links”, so if you want to read more about this topic, drop over there for a while.
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thank you so much for showing me how to cloak affiliate links
they are ugly for sure…..
merry christmas hugs / Miss Lena Li
Comment by misslenali — December 23, 2011 @ 4:30 pm