Today I’m going to explain link cloaking. You’ll learn what it is, why to use it and how to use what I use (Which is the best for Wordpress.) You may of heard the term or already be familiar with it.

Here are the benefits of link cloaking.

1. It’s been proven that if the link/URL you are sending your visitors to are too long or ugly, your visitors get scared off and will not click on the links.

Example: Get a link from any affiliate management site such as cj.com, clickbank.com, clickshare.com, amazon.com, etc…
Here’s what it may look like:

http://www.amazon.com/click2/432zxve231/djfjfgs2tracjk2

With link cloaking you can make it look like the following:

http://www.yoursite.com/recommends/goal-setting.html

Chances are, you’ll get more clicks on the cloaked link then you will on the straight affiliate link provided by the vendor.

2. Tracking
Using the right link cloaker will track the clicks for you which is very important. You have to know if people are clicking.

This is useful too when submitting articles to get visitors to your blog or adding cloaked links outside of your blog’s content. If you track all your activities you’ll eliminate yourself from the guessing game. Which I highly recommend you do.

3. Protecting Your Affiliate Commissions.

This is not a big deal in niches other than Internet marketing. However, people do replace your affiliate link with their affiliate link to get the commissions thus cheating you out of yours.

Think about that for a moment… You take the time to recommend a product, teach your viewer how to use the product, offer support and the viewer uses their affiliate link to buy by replacing your affiliate I.D.with theirs. This is so uncool and many affiliate programs will not give you credit if you do this but people still do it.

What to look for in a link cloaking program.

1. No reoccurring fees.

Forget joining some online link tracking/cloaking service because they hold you hostage and one more monthly reoccurring fee takes away from our bottom line. And if they go out of business, you are left holding the bag.

2. Buy Once, Install Anywhere.

It has to give you rights to install on as many sites you own for a one time fee.

3. The Ability to Backup ALL Affiliate Links and Data.

If the program does not let you backup all your links, and something happens to your blog like it gets hacked or durring an update things get messy, you’ll lose all your links. This means, whoever clicks on your cloaked links will endup at 404 (Not Found) page on your blog. This happened to me three months ago and there was nothing I could do to fix it.

After spending at least a 1,000 dollars over the past five years on link cloaking and tracking programs, I found one that does what I need and more. It’s only for Wordpress blogs.You can read more about it from the author here.

It does everything I need as listed in what to look for above in a link cloaker/tracker. And it does something else that is a real time saver and money maker.

With this program, you can add an affiliate link to every post in your Wordpress blog with one click. Here’s what I mean:

Say you have 100 posts. Each post has a word “Hosting” because you promote hosting and talk about it often. Well, within this link cloaking program you can replace every word (Hosting) with your cloaked affiliate link. So now, no matter what post your reader reads they will have the ability to click on your affiliate link.

It also allows you to only link one word per post. Because if you have the word hosting show up in a post five times, it’s not going to look good if each word is linked.

The most important benefit is the ability to backup and restore my data.

If you ever lost profitable data as I have, it’s a total bummer. I hope this never happens to you.

One last point: Some affiliate programs die! If this happens, all links you have pointed to them will be useless. This is a BIG problem if you have links in PDF documents, articles, in your posts, in forum posts, etc… With the program I use, all you do is edit your link and point it to a new affiliate program you want to promote and you’re back in business with a few clicks. Without this function, all your hard work goes down the drain.

If you are serious about affiliate marketing and making money from your blog, I can’t recommend you use anything else but this program.