Why it is important to cloak your affiliate links

Affiliate marketing is promoting other one's products and earn a commission when they buy through your promotion link, or as we call it, your affiliate link.

If you’re not cloaking your ugly looking affiliate links, you’re missing out on the immense advantages of link cloaking and should start immediately.

Find out why...

What is link cloaking?

Link cloaking is masking that ugly-looking affiliate link. When a site visitor clicks the cloaked link, it redirects to the intended merchant.

Why you should cloak your affiliate links

You want clean URLs

Those affiliate links you get from the merchants are always ugly looking, lengthy, a long URL with nonsensical information.

By presenting a clean, understandable affiliate link, you’ll inspire trust in your visitors and make them more likely to click.

An example of one of my own links:

ShareASale: https://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?b=40&u=1058099&m=47

Clean link: affiliatesuccesses.com/ShareASale

To make the links easier to share

Because all my affiliate links are like https://affiliatesuccesses.com/ [merchant or product name] they are easy to remember or to share, not only on my website or emails but also on all the different social media platforms I am part of.

Instead of having to look each affiliate link up individually and cutting and pasting a long string of code, I can tell you in a matter of seconds what the link is.

To better manage the links

You can reuse the same merchant link for all of your campaigns. The only reason to use a different link is for a different offer.

If the merchant changes the offer, or changes affiliate networks (a common occurrence) you have only one link to change.

Nothing is worse than clicking on an affiliate link that’s no longer valid. It leads to a poor user experience. Using a direct link supplied by the merchant leads to a lot of work anytime you are required to update a link.

It makes sense to manage your affiliate links in one central location.

You either can use affiliate link cloaking software services or like in my case (as I built all my websites with WordPress) a WordPress plugin called Pretty Links.

Final thoughts

Instead of just using an affiliate link as is, it’s better to make it look more professional with cloaking.

By presenting a clean, understandable affiliate link, you’ll inspire trust in your visitors and make them more likely to click.

Affiliate links are the lifeblood of any affiliate-based business. So you better manage them well!

All the best,

Luc

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