There are many ways to make money on the Internet and one of them is by promoting affiliate offers.
When you promote an affiliate offer you are basically acting as a sales rep for the product you are promoting. You are now their marketing department.
So let’s say you own a fancy little digital camera that you love. You decide that you want to create a post about it on your site. A basic review would be wonderful but why not try to make money off of it.
Here is how you would do that.
First you would go to a site like Amazon and sign up as an affiliate. Once you are signed up you can begin putting links to Amazon pages and products on your site. However, these aren’t just any links. These are special links. These links have some sort of identification in them which lets Amazon know exactly how the traffic got to their site. So if someone clicks on your link and heads over to the Amazon site, Amazon knows that you sent them. If that person were to purchase the camera from Amazon you would get a small percentage of the sale.
When putting affiliate links on your own site it is a good idea to cloak them. By cloaking them you are hiding that identifying code so that others can’t see it and possibly steal your affiliate commissions by changing it.
There are many ways to cloak links on your site, but I have found a very simple site, created by Justin Brooke that walks you through the process and best of all is free.
He also created a great little video that I have embedded below which shows you exactly how to cloak your link.
As always if you have any questions, please leave a comment or shoot me an email.
{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
Great post. If you have a WordPress blog, another super simple way to cloak links is to use a WordPress plugin called GoCodes. It’s quick and extremely simple. I made a video about it over at my blog if you’re interested.
.-= Matt Wolfe´s last blog ..The Best Free Tools For Online Marketers =-.
Matt thanks for stopping by! I just checked out your GoCodes video. It looks like a great plugin. I like the fact that you can easily see the number of times the link was clicked from within the Wordpress dashboard.
That’s a brilliant idea to cloak affiliate links. Thanks for the idea.Sounds like an amazing product!
.-= Lyndon´s last blog ..Mistakes To Avoid On Your Business Cards – Part 1 =-.
Lyndon, I figured I’d post this method since it was so easy. There are other ways as well. It really doesn’t matter which technique you use as long as you are using one. I highly recommend cloaking all your affiliate links.
Thanks for the video. I’m just starting to cloak my links and this is very helpful. Also, free frames solution from Akinori Furukoshi is working well for me. I just haven’t figured out yet how to handle the more complex ones with tables, images and such… Any comments would be appreciated!
I agree with Matt. GoCodes is without doubt the best free plugin to cloak affiliate links.
.-= Stefan´s last blog ..How to Make the Most of Your Comments =-.
Matt and Stefan, does GoCodes also do tracking?
Well, it depends on what you mean with tracking. It will count the number of clicks every link get and you can reset this count. But you can not see if it is unique visitors or their IP, etc.
.-= Stefan´s last blog ..Build Backlinks With Article Directories =-.
Perfect, Stefan.
That’s exactly what I was looking for ….click tracking. I’ll give it a try.
I’m using another plugin right now but there seems to be quite a bit of a delay on some of the links when they are clicked.
Commission theft is really a major concern for the newbies in the affiliate marketing field. Justin Brooke’s site is impressive and the most important thing is that it is hassels free. I loved it and thanks for it.
.-= How to Make Quick Money´s last blog ..5 Tips to Becoming a Better Leader =-.
I use pretty links – a free wordpress plugin on my site to cloak links and it works great.
buying a rice cooker´s last post ..17 Austos Depremi
Pretty links is a great Wordpress plugin as is GoCodes. I’ve used both of them in the past.
I have since moved onto a paid solution since I needed some more advanced tracking functionality.
But Pretty Links is great for basic Wordpress link cloaking.
Hey Eric,
I recently have read the benefits of cloaking and am trying to use Pretty Link but the long ugly Amazon link still shows up when hovering over. Actually, I visited ‘buying a rice cooker’ above and the same thing with those links. Isn’t the link supposed to be shortened and actually cloaked? Also, is there a paid cloaker you would recommend?
Thanks.
Rob´s last post ..Is There a Recession Going On?