Link Cloaking – How cloaking affiliate links will make you more money
Posted on April 29th, 2009 in Conversion Rates, Internet Marketing Strategies | 22 Comments »
Link Cloaking
What the heck is link cloaking? To be as plain as possible, cloaking affiliate links is the art of showing your visitors an internal link when they mouse over an affiliate link so that the visitor doesn’t think they are leaving your site.
For example, one of the websites we used to run was a site that provided leads to online universities. We used a third party affiliate company to gather the leads. So when someone came to our site and wanted to request information from University of Phoenix they had to click on the “request info” button.
When they would do that they would be taken off of our site and to the third party affiliate company where they could fill out the form to request info. The url would be something like http://www.affiliatesite.com/affid=1234?schoolid=366.
So in order to make a more user friendly experience we started cloaking affiliate links by creating a php redirect that when they hovered over the “request info” button it showed the url destination to be http://www.oursite.com/univeristyofphoenix.
This type of link cloaking created a less stressful user experience so they would be more likely to click on the link. They still ended up on the same affiliate page but we found out that more people would click through to the page with the affiliate links cloaked.
Link Cloaking To The Next Level
After awhile we saw that there was a disconnect between the design of our site and the design of the affiliate pages we were sending our visitors to. We really wanted to create consistency as much as possible so we wanted somehow to keep the same design of the site on the affiliate page.
Since we couldn’t control the affiliates website we went to the next best thing. We used an iframe to keep the form where they request information on our site. This creates a smoother user experience.
When you set up your affiliate pages using this link cloaking technology your website visitors don’t ever have to know that they are dealing with an outside website. Because the user experience stays completely seamless they will be more likely to fill out the form and thus we would make more money.
So if you are looking for a great way to cloak affiliate links, this has been one of the most successful ways that we have done it. The biggest thing to take away is that ultimately what we are doing is taking away any mental roadblocks our users might have before they get to the form. Good luck with your link cloaking strategies.
22 Responses
Great Post. I know when I first began perusing the internet for various reasons, I didn’t pay much attention to what the link said at the bottom of the page as I hovered over it. But now that I’m more experienced (and especially now that I have had my eyes opened to the internet marketing world), I rarely click on a link without at least glancing at where it points to.
I’ve also found it quite useful when reviewing products or websites. It’s actually surprising what you can learn about a site (for example, who they are affiliated through) by using the info in their links as a tool (and watching it change as the site redirects).
is there a step by step guide that will teach me how to cloak page by itself and in iframe?
Not that I have seen or used but I am sure there is something out there. Maybe we will do a post in the future teaching that exact thing.
Just curious, can this backfire with certain users that might notice they have been duped and be upset about it? Ever received any such feedback? What was the bounce rate impact after implementing this cloaking?
This is a beautiful idea. I would very much enjoy a lesson on iframes. ;)
Good idea, but be careful. It is against the Terms of Service on most affiliate programs to frame affiliate offers. I know Amazon bans people for this technique. A better solution is to just cloak the link, but still send them to the offer unhampered.
Daniel
How do you cloak a link if you don’t have a website yet?
You probably need a website first.
That’s what I thought but wanted to check, thanks Adam.
Does anyone agree that in the future there will be a way for google to encrypt links to find out if it’s a cloaked link? I have to wonder and fret when I think about it. Technology can be a scarey thing!
Cloaking makes a lot of sense thanks for the good information.
I am genuinely impressed with the general content of your blog. It is easy to determine that you are fervent about your writing. If I had your writing ability, I know I would be successful. I have bookmarked your site and look forward to more updates.
Success in any business will not happen overnight. It still requires time and effort to get your affiliate marketing strategy up and running. However, if you are determined, decided and prepared to give it your all, affiliate marketing will be the perfect career chance for you.
Without a doubt, there is money to be saved from cloaking long and ugly affiliate links. It is not good enough to use tiny-url style links. They do not look professional. The idea of using frames has been around for a while and works in most cases unless the merchant site has a frame-breaker.
whether this cloaking with the link well get a referral commission for us? I am waiting for your answer, and thanks for you share
Smart blogging, in answer to your question yes you would still get credit for the sale and get the commission.
The cloaking and the framing are great tactics to use. I have not implemented them yet, but I do see there value and will use it in the future, so I have bookmarked this page.
thanks a bunch!
This is a great post! IFrames are good for lots of things, but I find this method as being their most valuable use.
I find cloaking so interesting in gaining a traffic. This is good to be applied to our site. Thank you for being generous to have shared your ideas here. Good day!
this is not the exact answer for this question , its a type of cheating the search engine and creating the page purposely for googel
Thing I never understood is what is the big deal if someone provides you the information you are looking for whether it be affiliate or not, why is that such a big deal? Oh no, someone made money for me finding out more information, god for freakin bid. Someone had enough gumption to find out how to provide information, they did their work, they provided the information, why should anything else matter?
If anything they should be glad they helped out someone that might be an affiliate who may not have a job, and to give your full business to a corporation is much better and makes you feel better inside than by clicking on someones affiliate link who provided you the information to begin with?
People these days are whiney babies plain and simple.
I read about link cloaking in Ewen Chia’s book, but have never really applied it. I am looking forward in using some software to practically applying link cloaking for all my links.
great post…thanks for the tips….