It may sound like a joke, but the term “cloak and dagger” applies just as much to the affiliate marketing arena as it does to film noir or to mystery novels in fact, if you don’t cloak your links, you just might get stabbed in the back!
If your link to an affiliate product — a product from which you will get a commission — contains the product URL followed by your affiliate ID, it is all too easy for someone to just visit the URL directly and cut off your affiliate ID.
Why would someone do this? Some people don’t like the idea of being “sold” to. Others might think they can get a discount if they leave off your affiliate ID. Most maliciously of all, some might try to substitute their own affiliate ID For yours in order to get a commission off of your link!
Another reason to cloak your links is that affiliate programs come and go. What if you’re promoting your link all over the Internet and in e-books, and the affiliate program either fails or changes its URL? That means all your links are toast! So you will need to scramble to all the places on which you have posted your affiliate link to change it, and most likely you won’t get all of them.
Mac users have multiple options for cloaking their links. Cloak and Tracker has been around for awhile and has both a Mac and PC version. It cloaks your links by creating a redirect file on your server through which your links are channeled.
The Mac-only program Macfilink from Dejal Software (donationware) takes a different approach. It creates an encoded HTML page for you to upload to your own site, so that your customers see the merchant’s site on your site with your URL, instead of the affiliate URL. in both cases, customers never see the affiliate URL, only your own.
No matter how you choose to do it, cloaking your affiliate links will help protect your earnings and save you time, trouble, and money in the long run.
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