Cloaking Your Links

Whenever you are doing affiliate business, you should use a link other than the one assigned to you by ClickBank, Commission Junction, etc. This involves a free service of which you should take advantage.

Why not simply use the URL that was assianged by the payment processor?

One reason is that the original link is usually long and clumsy. Another reason is that it is easily recognizable as an affiliate link. The major reason is that the original URL can be manipulated by taking out your user nickname. There will always be people that will purposely erase your code name so that you do not get the commission, and even worse they will place their own code on the link so that they will get the commission instead of you. Unless you redirect the URL, you will lose revenue.

If the payment processor for your affiliate is located at clickbank, then you would go to clickbank.com and get the link for that affiliate. The link that you get could look like the following.

http://joenewbie.abc.hop.clickbank.net

Then you would go to www.tinyurl.com. Right there on the home page will be the entry box. The following statement will show up.

Welcome to TinyURL!™ Are you sick of posting URLs in emails only to have it break when sent causing the recipient to have to cut and paste it back together? Then you've come to the right place. By entering in a URL in the text field below, we will create a tiny URL that will not break in email postings and never expires.

You will then enter your hoplink and a new link will show up. You can then use that tinyurl link on your website, and when hit, your visitor will go the same landing page as normal. Once the landing page is hit, your code will be recognized and you will get the commission if the visitor buys from that landing page.

You should do this for every affiliate link. You can save these links by making copies right from the tinyurl.com page, or you can save them to a text file where you can retrieve them by using COPY and PASTE from the edit tool.