Commission theft is the biggest fear for most affiliate marketers. Link cloaking software has emerged as a great solution to protect your affiliate links and the subsequent commissions. Think of a situation where the user gets convinced to buy your product, but the moment they recognize that it is actually an affiliate product and purchasing the same will help you earn some commission, they will simply sign up for that affiliate program themselves and use their own affiliate URL to make the purchase. This way, all your efforts go in vain. The amount of commission that you deserve to get goes into someone else’s pocket. The use of an affiliate link cloaking software program will protect your link form hijacking and bypassing.

Protection From Affiliate Link Bypassing

Bypassing is the term that is used when a person directly uses the website address instead of your affiliate URL to make the purchase. Affiliate links are very easy to recognize. It is a common tendency for people to hate clicking on suspicious links. They do not want the products to be sold out to them. Even if they are convinced with the benefits of buying the product, the moment they recognize that it is an affiliate link, they consider it as a sales pitch. In that case, they go directly to the product’s main selling site instead of following your affiliate link. This way, you are deprived of the commission you deserve to get. But, you can secure your commission by using a good affiliate link cloaking software program. The program will hide the link’s actual identity and the user will not be able to recognize that it is actually an affiliate link.

Convert The Uninviting Links Into A Click-Able Link

Most affiliate links are usually very long and look quite ugly. With the help of a cloaker, you can easily change the look of your link by making it simple and highly inviting. For example, an affiliate link may look like this – www.productsite.com/affiliatepage.asp?affid=prodaffid4653. On the other hand, once you cloak the link, it will look something like this – www.yoursite.com/productsite.

Hijacking of affiliate link is also very common where the person uses his/her own affiliate id instead of yours to make a purchase. This way, they get the commission that you were supposed to get. The majority of the Internet community does not want to lose any opportunity to make some easy money online. Therefore, if you have not properly cloaked your affiliate links, you are actually creating a threat for your own commissions and providing the users an easy opportunity to hijack that commission. So, make sure you use a good affiliate link cloaking software program. Also, do not go for the free programs. Most of them are spam and those that work do not provide sufficient protection to your affiliate links.

If you’re getting started in affiliate marketing, you may have heard people talking about affiliate link cloaking and perhaps been wondering if this is something you should be doing as well.

There are several arguments for someone to cloak their links,

1. Affiliate link hijacking – occurs when someone uses their own affiliate link to purchase a product. Lets say, for example, that you read about a product on my site and click the link to the product’s main site to check it out. You then decide to buy the product, but you copy the information in the URL and then substitute your own affiliate link in place of mine. When you use the new link to buy the product, you get the commission instead of me.

2. Affiliate link bypassing – occurs when someone simply removes the affiliate link to go directly to the product’s main selling site. Some people do this because they do not want you to get the commission.

3. Affiliate link condensing – some affiliate links can be long, ugly, and uninviting, which can cause some people to avoid clicking the link. Many people will recognize an affiliate link and will not click on it because the do not like being sold to, or only view it as a sales pitch. You want as many people to click your link as possible so if you have a link that looks something like this, www.productsite.com/affiliatepage.asp?affid=prodaffid4653, you would cloak the link to look something like this, www.yoursite.com/productsite, to make it appear more inviting.

How to cloak your links

There are several ways to cloak your links and there also exist various pieces of software that will generate cloaked link pages for you. However, I do not recommend link cloaking software because doing it manually is really quite easy and does not require a lot of HTML experience.

The easiest way is to create a framed page that points to your affiliate link. To do this, create a blank HTML page with the usual html, head, and title tags. Then create a frameset tag right below the head tag and add a frame tag nested within the frameset tag. Include a src attribute within the frame tag that includes your affiliate link.

Here is a simple example of what a cloaked page should look like (I’ve removed the angled brackets to prevent the tag names from being parsed out of this article):

html

head

title – TITLE OF YOUR PAGE – /title

/head

frameset

frame src=”YOUR AFFILIATE LINK”/

/frameset

/html

This page will display your URL and page title with the affiliate page.

One other method you can use is a link cloaking service, such as tinyurl. These services will take any URL and create a redirect for them using a shortened URL (usually related to the service’s main URL. E.g. tinyurl/productsite). This may be desirable if you are marketing an affiliate product and you do not yet have your own web host. But if you use this method, be aware that some ad sites and pay-per-click programs do not allow you to use a redirected URL such as those offered by link cloaking services.

Should you cloak your affiliate links?

Now that you know the problems facing affiliate links and how to cloak them, you may be asking yourself if you should in fact use this method.

Some marketers may consider the use of cloaked links dishonest – they feel that if they have a good enough relationship with their customers and develop a high level of trust, people will not have any issues clicking on the original affiliate link (this really only works for email marketing). Others simply feel they are optimizing their marketing and protecting their sales; to get as much possible returns for their efforts as possible.

There really is no correct answer. In the end, you will need to decide if affiliate link cloaking is the best approach for your business.

 

There are a variety of free URL shortening services available and are becoming rather popular on the internet. Sites like TinyURL.com, SnipURL.com, MakeAShorterLink.com, and Shorl.com can take a long URL and convert it to a much shorter one. These tools are useful, especially when trying to e-mail a long URL that is likely to wrap in the e-mail. When a recipient receives a longer than normal URL in an email and tries to click on it, because of the wraparound, the partial URL is likely to result in an error message. A quick, free visit to any of the above mentioned sites will create shorter URLs so they do not wrap in an email message. URLs that break in emails cause the recipient to have to cut and paste it back together. This is extra work that your possibly new customer may find to be too much of an effort on their part and quickly lose interest. By entering in a URL in the text provided on these sites, a shorter URL is created that will not break in email postings and never expire.

 

One problem with URLs shortening or redirection services is that they mask the actual domain name of the site containing the information content. That domain name can be very useful in determining the origin of the information, the reliability of it, and even whether or not to actually click on it. If done correctly, however, this problem should be a rather easy one to get past.

 

There are ways to shorten URLs that will not mask the domain name or require the services of a URL redirection service. Often, but not always, the beginning www. of a URL can be left off. And as long as it remains recognizable, the http:// portion can almost always be left behind. Bear in mind, however, that these shortcuts not always work. Leaving off the www. may or may not get you to the same page. It all depends on what the domain website decides to do with their name for the purpose of getting more traffic.

 

Sometimes the problem isn’t even the length of your domain address but you may simply not want to post it because it might give away that it’s an affiliate link. If that’s the case, most shortening URL websites allow you and your affiliate link to remain hidden from visitors.

 

The features that some of these URL shortening sites include are not just specialized in creating short links. They can also allow you to create a personalized sub-domain on the short URL you want to create. They can anonymize URLs, password-protect your short URLs, allow you to add certain tags to URLs, and protect links of files hosted on some free file hosting websites. Additionally, most URL shortening services will allow you to also view the statistics of your URL views. Last but not least, the good news about the shortening URL websites is that they are compatible with most web browsers and platforms as long as your bookmarks or favorites allow Javascript.

 

 

Have you heard people talking about Affiliate Link Cloaking? Perhaps you’ve been wondering how it works and if it’s something you should be using on your website?

There are a couple practical reasons why you may want to cloak your affiliate links,

1. Affiliate links can be hijacked – this is when someone, usually another affiliate, uses their own affiliate link to purchase the product you’re promoting. They can copy your affiliate URL and then plug in their own affiliate id, effectively stealing your commission.

2. Affiliate links can be bypassed – this is when someone simply goes directly to the merchant’s main sales site by removing your affiliate link. People may do this because they don’t want you to get any commission for the product they’re purchasing.

There are also various cosmetic reasons why you may want to cloak your affiliate links, the most useful being affiliate link condensing. Some affiliate links are long and ugly, which makes them appear unattractive and some people may avoid clicking the link. Affiliate links like this are easily recognizable by many people, which may cause them to avoid clicking the link because they feel it’s a sales pitch. Plus, an affiliate link that stand out opens the door for affiliate link hijacking and bypassing.

How Do I Cloak My Affiliate Links?

The easiest way to cloak your affiliate links is to create a framed page. This is explained in detail at No-Nonsense-Marketing.com – Affiliate Link Cloaking.

If you do not have your own website to host a cloaked page, you may want to consider a link cloaking service such as TinyURL.com. Link cloaking services take a URL and generate a redirect for them using a shortened URL such as tinyurl.com/merchantsite. However, if you decide to use a link cloaking service, be aware that some pay-per-click programs and ad sites don’t allow the use of redirected URLs.

Once you’ve learned how to cloak your links, you may ask yourself if this technique is appropriate for your website. Cloaking your affiliate links can be a useful technique to secure your commissions, but it is a little misleading to your visitors. You will ultimately need to decide if affiliate link cloaking is right for your business.

Find the insider scoop on the latest Internet Marketing products before you buy them! – Internet Marketing Reviews

In today’s world of affiliate marketing business, protection from commission theft such as hijackers, link bypasses, and parasite software, is still one major concern many affiliate online businesses face today.

There is no easy way out. There are no 100% full proof protections. There is no such thing as complete protection solution. The best way is to understand what common techniques and tactics fraudsters employ. From there, you can deploy some form of cloaking techniques to better protect your affiliate business.

Most affiliate Marketers do not seem to know,for example, that parasite software hits after your visitor has landed at the merchant’s site. So even if your visitor has successfully used your affiliate link through the redirect, there is a high chance that you would not receive your commission because the parasite software recognizes the merchant’s page as one it is affiliated with, and cookies can get overwritten easily. And you lose your affiliate sales just like that.

Since cloaking is so crucial, I will take this opportunity to share some brief protection methods employed by various link cloakers.

Cloaking Method 1

By converting your Affiliate link on your web page to HTML Unicode. It uses Unicode link URL and Status Bar text changes for cloaking.

Cloaking Method 2

By using Embedded Affiliate Link along with HTTP Meta Refresh Redirect. It redirects to the Merchant’s Site via clean URL address.

Cloaking Method 3

Advanced Framing Technology that displays the Merchant’s sales page on your web site in a Frame.

Cloaking Method 4

By using Framed pages with encrypted Frame Source URL.

Cloaking Method 5

By using Framed web pages with encrypted HTML Source Code.

Cloaking Method 6

By using hidden Inline Frames.

These are some of the main methods that cloakers employ. There are pros and cons of each method. Be realistic, nothing’s perfect. But without employing any protection, the risk of lost sales is much higher. I personally encourage affiliate marketers to remember a golden rule – “lost sales equal no sales”.

So lower the risk and do not compromise.

Copyright 2008

 

URL Cloaking is when your website domain name remains in the address bar of the browser "cloaking" the destination URL (web address) from all visitors’ eyes. The web surfers won’t see the “forwarded to” web address in their browsers at all. URL or link cloaking is basically when you show search engine bots one thing and humans another. One reason people URL cloak is because they believe the search engines have fingerprinted affiliate links and if the bots see them it will hurt there organic SEO rankings and if they are doing Pay Per Click marketing that it will hurt there quality score and thus raising there prices per click.

 

Have you ever looked at a set of very competitive search results and wondered how in the world a certain website was ranking so well? There’s a chance that the website in question is using URL cloaking to hide some of their links and prevent fellow SEOs from reverse engineering their rankings.

 

There are several ways to URL cloak. The top three ways to cloak are listed below:

 

All Inclusive 301 Redirect

The most common form of link cloaking is a simple 301 redirect. Both bots and humans who click on a link from Site 1 to Site 2 are forwarded onto Site 3 through a 301 redirect. The link juice and anchor text are attributed to Site 3 while the link itself does not show up in a back-link search for Site 3. This allows you the ability to send link traffic to a bad "neighborhood" without actually linking to it.

Bot Redirect

If you want to get a little more covert, you can cloak the content. In this case, the search engine bots get 301 redirected to Site 3 while normal web surfers are given the actual content on Site 2. This helps create trust with web surfers as they see what they are expecting when clicking on the link from Site 1. The fact you are linking to Site 3 is essentially hidden from people checking back-links for Site 3 and web surfers visiting any of the three sites.

 

User Redirect

This is considered more of a traditional cloaking setup. In this case web surfers clicking on the link from Site 1 to Site 2 are 301 redirected to Site 3 while the search bots are given the actual content on Site 2. We see this technique used by many black-hats building massive machine generated content networks. They want Site 2 to rank in the engines so they can direct traffic to their money making websites. In most cases, this type of setup defeats the purpose of link cloaking as nothing is hidden from back-link checks or web surfers.

 

It’s also possible to mix and match all three of the above based on the user agent or IP address allowing complete control over the final destination of your traffic.

 

 

When you have a shorten URL people can remember the short one longer, than opposed to an extremely long one with over 20 characters long. Not only are they memorable but they can instantly notice what topic is on the page since the end of the URL is visible with the appropriate keywords.

If you are an online marketer, you must know that affiliate IDs are ones that lower your turn around rates. When people see the URL with the affiliate ID, they’ll know it’s an affiliate link and perhaps not click on the link, or just go directly to the home page (by typing it in manually) so that you do not get credited. Unfair? Of course, that is why a short URL can help you. It will mask your affiliate link into something much more short and the best thing is that your affiliate URL is well hidden as you cannot see it in the url whatsoever! It’s also a great way to sneak in affiliate IDs in forum signatures as well. Sometimes there are character limits to signatures, so of course, your original affiliate URL will be taking up a lot of characters or it won’t even fit inside your signature. Using a short url will save you characters to add in descriptive anchors, bold your text and even add in color. Be original!

For email addresses, you can hide them on websites! You don’t only need to use conventional WWW urls, but this site also accepts email addresses. This is ideal for those who don’t want web spiders to crawl and index your email, because, as most of you know: that can lead spam.

If you want to cloak an address, they can do this too. Some people don’t want visitors finding out what the URL is, so they get a shortened url from tube url. This is also ideal if you don’t want a spider to crawl through to your web address, for whatever reason you have. An example would be a submission for mailto:name@mail.com, the short URL would come out as www.tubeurl.com/mailname instead.

One of the advantage is that the URLs last for quite a long time. They don’t necessarily expire but Tube URL will delete addresses that are not following the terms of services. Just read it over and do not go against it and you will be fine!

Take advantage of this short URL script since it’s free! Maybe you’ve gained some new ideas on how you can benefit with short URLs from this article. This can help you monetize indirectly, clean up your website URLs and many more. Also, don’t forget to share this site with other people you know that might benefit with Tube Url, help the site grow!

There are many reasons for cloaking your affiliate links – some of which are extremely valid. These include affiliate link hijaking, affiliate link bypassing and condensing your affiliate links.

Affiliate link hijacking is theft of your sales commission through a person who comes to your website, decides they want to buy the product and substitutes their own affiliate link in the place of yours. When they use the new link to purchase the product, they gain the sales commission instead of you.

Affiliate link bypassing is like hijacking but no one gets the commission. For whatever reason, the person who arrives at your site, clicks on the link will then remove the link ID and neither you nor the purchaser gets a commission. While affiliate link hijacking is more annoying, affiliate bypassing is also a no-win situation for the people involved.

Condensing your affiliate link just makes sense. Less so now, but still quite prevalent is the link that goes on forever. It’s long, needs to be carefully cut and pasted into a person’s browser to work properly and generally discourages a person from trying to visit a site via your link at all. Condensing the link goes a long way towards producing a link that is user-friendly and, as a result, garners a higher click through rate.

With all of that said, there is a couple easy ways to cloak your affiliate link to take care of any of these three conditions: affiliate hijacking, affiliate bypassing or condensing of the affiliate link.

Probably the simplest and safest way to cloak an affiliate link is by using URL masking. For the product in question, purchase a domain and forward it to the affiliate link using URL redirection and masking. This will assure that your affiliate link will be seen by no one and it will be very difficult for the surfer to alter or change.

You can also place a simple redirect on your site that will create an actual web page on your website. It will be a page containing only the bare necessities so that it loads quickly. Simply place a redirect after the body tag with your actual affiliate URL and upload it via FTP to your domain.

There are a number of sites which will teach you how to mask your URL as well as some free places that will make the URL redirect for you. Simple Google and put URL redirect as the search term. While there are a number of places, check each one because all are not equal.

Another approach is to simply use a service that shortens and changes your URL so that it is unchangeable. These sites will take a long affiliate link with your affiliate ID and change it to something that not only shortens the link but masks your ID in the process. Just remember, with URL shorteners only work until you get to your location. Upon landing on the main page of the program you are promoting, it will then show your affiliate ID.

The services available that will help with cloaking your affiliate URL include:

- http://www.tinyurl.com

- http://www.snipurl.com

While some marketers consider cloaked URLs a form of dishonesty, in today’s highly competitive market it is becoming almost a necessity to cloak them in order to make honest commissions. Unless an affiliate promoter has an extremely high level of trust with their website visitors and have sent out a specific email to a list, it is only prudent to take that extra step to be completely sure. Affiliate link cloaking is rapidly becoming the norm in Internet marketing.

Although there are many free online services that can cloak your affiliate links, using standalone cloaking software is still important so you can fully control link cloaking operations. Nothing can beat the functionalities of cloaking software so you better get one to protect your links and ensure the profitability of your online affiliate business.

Cloaking software has the capability to customize your affiliate links. With free online cloaking services, you are only limited to making your links shorter. But with a cloaking application, you can tweak your affiliate link and make it look like a standard URL or sales page link.

This capability is critical because it can have a big impact on your click through conversion. Online buyers usually click on a link that looks like a real URL. Essentially, you can convince more people to follow your links by using cloaking software.

Tiny URLs generated by free online services are sometimes banned by some ISPs. Some web services and email providers are also wary of tiny URLs generated by free services. So if you are going to use this cloaking method, there is a possibility that you can encounter issues or problems with ISPs and web service providers.

You can avoid all of these by using cloaking software. Developers of cloaking applications ensure that your links will be friendly to ISPs and spam filters. Because of this, you can avoid issues with ISPs and email providers. Your affiliate links therefore will become effective tools in bringing in big commissions for you.

If you are an internet marketer or promoter or run a mailing campaign, you work hard to provide your clients with the best resources and bargains on the internet. If this is the case, then you are aware of how negative it can be for you and your reputation to send clients to a broken link advertisement or a to a website that never opens and only creates an “error” message. A solution for this is to get an application for your business that constantly checks the database for the availability of a site’s URLs to ensure that a site is ready and working at the moment the client opens it.

Smart URLs convert an existing link so that the target page opens in a new browser window.Although it uses JavaScript, it is smart enough to work even if JavaScript is disabled (by opening the page in the same window) — keeping your site accessible to everyone, and far more user-friendly than a link that doesn’t work at all. It also has the advantage of keeping your pages valid which is ultimately every internet marketer’s or promoter’s goal.

The internet today is full of webmasters that are constantly updating, editing and even deleting web pages so the odds of coming up with a “404 File Not Found” error is unfortunately not uncommon. Thankfully, when using a smart URL application, the odds of this happening drop dramatically.

Updating your webpage is an excellent way to keep your content fresh. However, lets say you are updating your website completely, changing the names of page’s filenames and so on and you want to get rid of those old pages but without having to worry about those who go to the old web page and see nothing. If people are finding your old pages when requesting previously known information into these search engines, and they attempt to go to that page that has been deleted or moved, they will get a error message. No webmaster wants this to happen.

Having the smart URL application allows you to send the old information from a Web page or its URL through your browser. Your browser, whether it is Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator, will automatically reformat any Web page you send through it so it correctly fits inside the e-mail message or search query you are trying to expose to your customers.

Additionally, search engines such as Yahoo and Google now have smart URL toolbars to further the chances of redirecting customers to the correct pages using the old link information.