How to Increase Your Affiliate Income in One Easy Step
By Dan Higby
After you get started in affiliate marketing you”ll begin to look for ways to increase your income. If you can make more money from your campaigns for the same amount of work, why wouldn”t you? There’’s a simple step you can take to boost your commissions that is easy to implement and will have a big impact on how much money you make. It’’s called affiliate link cloaking.
Affiliate link cloaking is a process that you can use to make sure that your recommendations are using your affiliate link. Without your link, you won”t get credit for your recommendation and you won”t see your commissions roll in. You see, affiliate links have a specific look to them. For example, www.example.com/=?superaff is an affiliate link. The id after the “?” is the affiliate id.
If someone is familiar with the way an your link is set up, they may try to bypass the affiliate link by deleting the id after the question mark. There are many reasons why this happens. Some people just don”t feel comfortable with affiliate marketing, or they don”t want to give an affiliate their commissions. In some cases, they may try to use their own affiliate link. This is commission theft no matter how you look at it.
Whatever the reasons are, you can bypass commission theft by using an affiliate cloaker. A cloaker will change the ugly looking affiliate link (www.example.com/=?superaff) and turns it into a nice unchangeable link. This way your link will look like this - www.example.com/recommends/moneyebook.
There are many different ways that you can cloak an affiliate link in order to keep more of your commissions. If you want a simple way to cloak your affiliate link without having to install anything in your domain, you can use one of the many url minimizers available for free online. Tinyurl and Bitly will take your affiliate link and give it a short redirect link.
The only downside to this method is that once the person arrives on your affiliate link, the affiliate URL will show up in the header of the browser window. Although this a quick method to cloak your affiliate links, it can still be altered once the person arrives at the landing page. Since they can see your full affiliate link in the browser window, they can still delete your id if you really wanted to.
A much better method to cloaking your affiliate link is to create a page redirect within a domain that you own. You can either edit the htaccess file of your domain or you can create a php redirect.
I suggest that you put all of your links in a folder entitled “recommends”. This way each link will be structured http://www.example.com/recommends/affiliatemarketingcourse.
With affiliate cloaking you can be sure that your affiliate commissions are going where they should be…to your account!
About The Author
Dan Higby is the author of eBiz Snap a free newsletter for online marketers of all experience levels. Fill your mind with business snap fill your pockets with profit with your own complimentary copy of eBiz Snap News Letter.
