Affiliate Marketing - Does Affiliate Link Cloaking Work

You have an awesome website set up. You have worked hard at article marketing and generating backlinks to your website. You are quickly climbing up the ranks of the most widely used search engines. Now you are wondering why all your hard work has not been translating into commission sales. This is all too common for most affiliate marketers. You just know that you are missing a piece of the puzzle. And you would be right. It is very possible that you have heard the horror stories of affiliate marketers finding out that their conversions are ending up somewhere else besides in their own pockets. Some call it link hijacking or just plane affiliate theft. rnIt is hard to know for sure whether or not your affiliate sales are being stolen from you, but it is easy to protect yourself from it happening. So you might as well take precautions. You can protect your affiliate commission from this kind of theft by using link cloaking software. This article will try to shed some light on what happens to some affiliate marketers. It is not uncommon for people to notice that there is an affiliate ID of some sort in the link when they click on it. They will simply remove the most obvious part and leave the rest of the link intact that will still take them to the site that you have directed them too. This results in you loosing the affiliate sale. You may even be wondering why someone would do this. To explain this, I would need to be a physiatrist. Maybe people just don’t like the idea that a third person is making money off of their purchase. They might even think that it will cost them more unless they remove the affiliate ID in the link. Who knows why, but it happens anyway. Sometimes it is a case of someone searching for a product they are interested in, and if they are also an affiliate marketer, they know that they can remove your link and replace it with their own. In this case, they get the affiliate commission instead of you. Even though you did all the hard work to get them there. The only way to avoid these scenarios is to use a link cloaking software. And why not? Link cloaking software has several other benefits besides protecting your affiliate sales. Link cloaking software is a program that uses a redirect. You can create a link and point it to the affiliate link to be redirected. This allows you to give the redirecting link a more natural look. You can even give it a description that may entice the visitor to want to click on the link. Link cloaking software has other benefits besides saving your links from being hijacked or stolen. It is also capable of collecting data about your visitors and how they respond to your website or how long they stay. Once you have collected this valuable information, you can optimize your website to it’s fullest potential. rnRyan King is a link cloaking software expert and has created several tools for internet marketers and web designers. He has written several articles about different software including link cloaking.