Stop Link Hijacking By Using Link Cloaking

You figured out how to build money sucking landing pages, write and publish informative articles, and put together brilliant autoresponder email series but you're not making any sales. You have no idea as to what is happening. Does this sound familiar? This is a frequent occurrence on the Internet and unfortunately many do not have the understanding what is at work. Contrary to what you might think, your sales funnel may be working like gangbusters but you are not seeing any positive results. Your anticipated earnings just are not there. Obviously, this is a major drawback that you will want to resolve as soon as possible.

You know from looking at your click through rate (CTR) on PPC campaigns, you are receiving lots of traffic. You also know on average how many visitors to your website results in a sale. If your conversion rate plummets unexpectedly then you may be the victim of commission thieves. Basically, thieves are replacing your affiliate link with their affiliate link. This devious tactic will save them money but on the other hand steal money out of your pocket. Commission thieves can severely damage your affiliate business unless you put a stop to it quickly. In order to put an end to this theft you must begin cloaking your affiliate links.

Essentially, link cloaking is when you program a redirect on your website that camouflages your affiliate link. Link cloaking takes away the ability of commission thieves or spyware programs to substitute your link. Your affiliate link will then be preserved all the way to the merchant's order page. It is the affiliate link that contains your tracking ID that gets you credit for a sale. It's the only method for the merchant to know whom to credit for a sale.

Link cloaking plugs a major hole within affiliate marketing. Even if your current campaigns are profitable, by employing link cloaking you may be able to squeeze more profit out of each campaign by reducing your overall costs. Think about it, every sale lost to commission thieves drives your advertising costs up. Link cloaking locks in your sales and increases your earnings. One caveat, you should not try to program a redirect yourself unless you are an experienced programmer. Instead, there are many companies supplying link cloaking services. Do not get the first one you find. Some of the less desirable link cloakers will actually mess up the tracking cookie causing you to lose the sale anyway. You should search for link cloaking software that was specifically made for affiliate marketing and these are few in numbers. There are "short-link" (tiny url) services on the Internet that take long links and convert them into small links by redirection. My advice, do not use them. This is not really link cloaking. Your affiliate link will get munged by using them.

The top link cloakers are the ones created for affiliate marketing that can be installed on a website. It is regrettable that marketplaces such as Clickbank, for example, do not have security measures already in place that will protect the commissions of affiliates. A better system will have to be figured out in the future but as for now link cloaking is your best protection against commission thieves. Make an effort to do extensive research about the many link cloaking software programs offered. Choosing the correct one is critical for your future online business success.

Wayne Hairston has been a Webmaster and Internet Marketer since 1997. He has published several articles on the subject about Internet Marketing. Discover more about link cloaking in the free Cloak and Dagger Affiliate Secrets report. Feel free to distribute this article in any form as long as you include this resource box.