Pixelrage.net

While most internet marketers have the consensus that the general public is internet-retarded, the reality is that the awareness level of the average internet user is evolving rapidly. More people know of “affiliate links.” You know the kind – the ones that come from masked URLs like “anrdoezrs.net” and are followed up with a long string of unreadable crap. People see these links on the lower left hand side of their browser. When they don’t see something legible, they probably won’t click it. That’s a problem for all of you cookie-droppers.

It’s an age of affiliate marketing – everyone’s doing it. Everyone who isn’t doing it is hearing about it, then kicking themselves for not knowing about it sooner. Due to that fact, there’s a lot of shitty websites sprawling up all over the place with poor content and affiliate links, which makes the good guys look bad. However, they’re also skewing the public’s perception of online stores in general. It’s bad enough when search engines started cracking down on affiliate sites, but even worse when the customers themselves are wise to them.

Dressing Up your Affiliate Links with Link Cloaking

That’s where affiliate link cloaking comes in: it’s a process where you use a [perfectly legal] script to “mask” or hide the actual destination of a link, replacing its stated destination with something else that you specify. So, instead of sending someone to some 150-character URL filled with meaningless patterns of letters and numbers, you can send them to “mysite.com/products/whatever.” By making the destination of the link look more friendly, you’re increasing the credibility of that link as well as the level of trust in your visitors.

Best yet, there are top-notch plugins and scripts that will help you do this on the most popular content mangement systems: there’s Affiliate Link Cloaker for Joomla and Ninja Affiliate for WordPress. If you happen to use another CMS beyond these two, a simple Googling of “affiliate link cloaker” or “affiliate link masking” should show some options.

Don’t Want to Cloak Links? Shorten Them!

Alternately, lots of affiliate marketers use URL shortening services like Bit.ly and j.mp to shorten their links, because they now offer search engine friendly URL naming. Rather than using their mindless default garbage, you can maintain a structure for your long affiliate link to appear more like “bit.ly/affiliate-promotion.”