AffiliCloak: Affiliate Link Cloaker

Beware Affiliate Link Hijackers!

If you make money from affiliate marketing, you need protection. Spyware, browser toolbars, and other programs installed on the computers of your site's visitors may be removing your affiliate ID from your affiliate links and replacing it with their own, stealing your commissions. Or your site's visitors may be substituting their affiliate ID for yours to get a commission on their own purchases. And, strange but true, some of your visitors may be manually chopping your affiliate ID off of your affiliate links just because they don't want you to get a commission!

How widespread is the problem? No one knows for sure, but I've seen estimates as low as 1% and as high as 30%! Update: According to a recording I just listened to this morning, Mike Filsaime once tracked a ClickBank promo he was running and found that someone else (likely the buyer) had gotten credit for over 40% of sales where the buyer had originally clicked his link. And Gary Ambrose tested one of his promos and found that he was losing over 50% of commissions! With free and inexpensive protection options available, there's no reason to remain unprotected.

"Affiliate link cloaking"* is the name given to various technique that enable you to disguise your affiliate links to prevent these problems. AffiliCloak enables you to replace your easily recognizable (and thus easily hijackable) affiliate links like this:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471381861/moulc

with unique, protected links, like this:

http://WhiteHatCrew.com/moreinfo/a/0471381861

When someone clicks the protected link, AffiliCloak redirects them to the affiliate link, bypassing link hijacking software. The link above points to the book "Affiliate Selling: Building Revenue on the Web" on Amazon.com. Click below to see AffiliCloak in action:

Affiliate Selling: Building Revenue on the Web

Once AffiliCloak is installed, creating affiliate links is easy. Unlike some (most?) link cloakers, you don't have to create a new file for each cloaked link (for example, with the link above, there is no file named "0471381861" at "http://WhiteHatCrew.com/moreinfo/a/"). You just create the link with a code identifying the affiliate program (eg. "/a/" is for Amazon.com), and the ID of the product you're linking to (eg. "0471381861"). AffiliCloak intercepts and redirects the click.

To download AffiliCloak, use the form at the top of the middle column of this page.

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* Affiliate link cloaking is completely unrelated to search engine cloaking, which is a black hat technique for spamming search engines, and which I strongly recommend you avoid for both ethical and business reasons.

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