The Most Active and Friendliest
Affiliate Marketing Community Online!

“AdsEmpire”/  Direct Affiliate

How to Cloak Affiliate Links (and Why You Should)

D

djbaxter

Guest
How to Cloak Affiliate Links (and Why You Should)
by SugarRae, SugarRae.com
May 3, 2016

I always run my affiliate links through redirects – also referred to as cloaking affiliate links – for several reasons:

  • Running them through my redirects means I have a click count to match up to the one the merchant is reporting.
  • Affiliate links are usually ugly and impossible to remember without doing a copy/paste. Redirects allow you to create short, memorable URLS for them and allow you to access commonly used affiliate links from memory.
  • If you’re in an industry where you market to other affiliates, it can help prevent folks from switching out your affiliate ID with theirs.
  • If the merchant decides to change networks or linking methods, you can edit a single redirect instead of needing to edit every instance in which you linked to them throughout your entire site.
  • If you decide to change which merchant you’re using to promote a product, you can edit one redirect instead of needing to edit every instance in which you linked to them throughout your entire site.
  • If a handful of the merchants I mention on a regular basis don’t have affiliate programs, I’ll often still cloak the link to their main website. This way, if they ever do launch an affiliate program, I can affiliate all my previous links to them by updating the one cloaked link.
  • If you’re running an affiliate datafeed site, anything you can do to make your site more technically unique than the other 4000 affiliates using the same datafeed is a bonus in regards to affiliate datafeed SEO.

Read more...
 
MI
Back