If you’ve been researching affiliate marketing for awhile, you’ve probably come across the term “link cloaking” more than once.  In this tutorial, we’ll talk about what link cloaking is, why it’s really important  to your affiliate marketing business and how to do it very easily.

What is link cloaking?

Although “link cloaking” has different meanings in different contexts, when it comes to affiliate marketing,  the term  is used to refer to the practice of disguising  affiliate links so that they aren’t obvious to visitors. 

Let’s look at an example.  Say you created a site (www.yoursite.com) to promote an ebook on how to build a deck.  

In that case, your affiliate link (or “hoplink”) would look something like this -  http://55dc7j-dobijl365b9no-7rxfu.hop.clickbank.net.  Now, if you were to cloak that same affiliate link, it could appear like this  - http://www.FantasticDandruffCures.com/BestHomeRemedy.

Why Should You Cloak Your Affiliate Links?

Here are the 3 biggest reasons you should cloak your affiliate links:

1.  As more and more people buy things online, the public is becoming familiar with what affiliate links are and what they look like.  Unfortunately, some people are just adverse to the idea of you earning a commission on their purchases. When you cloak your affiliate link, it’s less obvious.  It looks more like a recommendation than an attempt to earn a commission.

2. Affiliate links are strange looking.   A lot of web surfers worry about viruses or sites that might harm their computer so they are less likely to click on a link that appears unusual.  Give them a link that’s nice looking and has the name of your site in it, and they’ll be much more likely to feel comfortable clicking on it.

3.  Google has recently been making changes to the way that it ranks sites.  These changes suggest that Google, in an attempt to provide a better user experience, may be moving toward penalizing obvious affiliate sites in its natural search engine rankings.  Properly cloaked affiliate links can help avoid this potential issue.

How to Cloak Your Affiliate Links

If you are using a Wordpress site for affiliate marketing, you can cloak your affiliate links really easily using the free “Pretty Link” plugin.  There is a paid version of the plugin available but if you’re just getting started with link cloaking, we  recommend you use the free version for now as it will cover all of your basic cloaking needs. 

The following video will show you how to install and use the “Pretty Link” plugin:

===> Video Tutorial – Affiliate Link Cloaking <===

Not Using Wordpress? 

If you aren’t using a Wordpress site, not to worry, you can still cloak your affiliate links. We suggest you consider using the Ninja affiliate cloaker.  It’s easy to install and works very well.  It also includes some nice advanced features that allow you to so some pretty cool things that will increase your sales!

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