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Link Cloaking and Affiliate Marketing – Why You Aren’t Getting The Sale
Posted by IMer | Posted in Internet Marketing | Posted on 27-01-2010
So you put together an amazing auto-responder email series, you have written stacks of amazing articles, and you have an undeniably catchy capture page that brings in the prospects. But somehow you’re obtaining almost no results and you don’t know why. Sound familiar? I realise this is a fairly normal problem, but it’s unfortunate that marketers still haven’t figured out what the cause is.
I’ll try to expand a little on what’s occurring to your leads throughout this article. Opposite to what you might be thinking – it is absolutely possible that your sales funnel is making masses of sales, but you’re not realising any of the revenue. Obviously this is a fairly large issue that you’ll wish to take care of as promptly as possible.
Basically what’s occurring is this: the user is altering your affiliate ID to their own, or spyware on their PC is doing it. Both of these will block you from getting credit for the sale even though you’re the person who made it. There’s no way that you can stop them from doing this, unless you disguise your link.
Link cloaking is where you program a redirect on your website that disguises affiliate ID’s and makes it impossible for spyware or users to stop you from getting your sales.
I hope you understand the difference this would make, you could be giving someone else some of your sales already. Instead of making money from your sales funnel you may be just diverting it off to someone else.
Even if you make sales all the time without difficulties, a portion of them may still be stolen. It wouldn’t hurt anything to start cloaking your links so you secure the sales. The difficulty is that it can be difficult to make a safe link cloak, unless you’re a programmer (or something of that nature).
Instead you can utilise one of the many link cloaking services on the web, but I wouldn’t suggest you just use the first one that you find. Many of these will actually mess up the tracking cookies and you STILL won’t receive credit for the sale. You need to make sure that you’re using a cloaking service designed for affiliate marketing – and there aren’t nearly as many of those.
I have heard horrific tales of affiliates who used redirection services such as TinyURL and Bit.ly – apparently they are notorious for often screwing up affiliate links and not giving you credit for any sales. Most other link shortening services will have these issues also.
The best link cloaker is one that you can house on your own site so you shouldn’t have to be frihgtened about anything breaking down or not functioning correctly. As I said previously though, this can be difficult to achieve if you aren’t a programmer – or able to pay one.
I recommend you go here and grab this free report about link cloaking and the top services for affiliate marketers: {!reportlink}. I don’t know of any better place to learn what works, and what doesn’t.
Discover more about link cloaking in the free Cloak and Dagger Affiliate Secrets report. Feel free to pass on this article in any form as long as you include this resource box. You can also include your affiliate link if you sign up at Clickbank Pirate.
