This is a great article for any affiliate marketer who wants to protect his/her commission. In this article Mr. Elrod gives very clear and simple ways to protect your commission. If you are online marketing, this is a must read.
Link cloaking is an enormously imperative function of affiliate marketing. In a nutshell,
link cloaking is a tactic to safeguard your affiliate commissions from being taken. It's not entirely infallible. Intelligent individuals who are highly-educated concerning the topic can still figure out how to keep you from getting your commission.
Most folks won't go that extreme, so cloaking your links will avert the majority of payment loss. How do individuals take affiliate commissions? Have you ever hovered above a link and noticed that the link was an obvious affiliate link?
A few folks type in the parent domain instead of clicking the link as a manner of making sure the holder of the site gets compensated 100% for the sale. Several folks incorrectly think that if they buy from an affiliate link, they'll need to pay more for a commission mark-up.
Certain people in reality do it for a separate reason. If you're selling a ClickBank product, specially to other marketers, several of them realize they can include their individual ClickBank ID and make what's ordinarily a 50% or more discount on the item.
This is a distinctive form of affiliate commission theft, since the individual doing it gets the affiliate commission themselves, rather than merely making definite you will not get it. The majority of individuals do not attempt this, of course.
Generally people are pretty honorable, and won't care giving you a little affiliate commission in trade for recommending an excellent item to them. Nevertheless it's sufficient of a point that you should engage steps to avert it.
You can easily establish your particular link cloaking method. What you would do is place a directory on one of your domains. Generally marketers exercise the domain of their personal name, as in bobsmith.com. They commonly retain a subdirectory named /recommends/.
Subsequently in that directory, they produce a brand new subdirectory for every product. It would look somewhat resembling this: www.bobsmith.com/recommends/awesomeproductname. In the directory, they set an enormously easy PHP redirect called index.php.
Each time they forward somebody to the above link, the script will redirect to your affiliate link. All you have to do is generate a folder in Notepad or your desired HTML editor and specify it index.php. Next paste the subsequent information into the file and upload it to your directory:
< ?php
header("location:http://affiliates.programhere.com/5555");
?>
There are a number of link cloaking scripts existing. A large amount of them are rather easy to set up and employ. There's a big advantage to using a script instead of doing it yourself. With your simple redirect, there isn't a simple means to test how much traffic you have sent to your link.
The majority of link cloaking scripts permit you to insert new links incredibly easy inside an administrative field, and subsequently every link is tracked so that you can see how much traffic is going via the link. If you use your particular file, the solitary way to distinguish how much traffic you have sent is through your affiliate stats, which could be inaccurate, or via your web server's stats, which can be clunky to use or demanding to figure out.
An alternative way you can do it is to use a link cloaking program, like Go Try This. This allows you to input the raw affiliate link and title your link whatever you want as an extension of your domain. Then you can log in and check statistics to find out how the best 10 links are performing via a chart and bar graph.
