Link Cloaking Is A Necessity If You’re An Affiliate Marketer

If you are currently making money online as an affiliate marketer, I want to bring to your attention of potential risks that you may be susceptible to and how to go about protecting yourself as an affiliate marketer. A marketing technique called link cloaking is a great way for Internet marketers, especially those who promote products for other vendors to avoid having attackers compromise their affiliate links and in this blog post, I’m going to explain what exactly link cloaking is an how it benefits you by implementing it. But first, for those who aren’t familiar with the term, let me explain exactly what link cloaking is.

What Is Link Cloaking And Why Should I Use It?

Link cloaking is mostly forgotten concept among affiliate marketers in which your affiliate links that you promote for others in an effort to make a commissions can be encrypted so other affiliate marketers or hackers can’t manipulate your affiliate ID to theirs to earn a commission. What I mean by “manipulating’ is when you place an affiliate link on a website or blog, hackers have the ability to modify or redirect your link to their affiliate ID so when someone clicks on your affiliate link and decides to purchase that particular product, they get the sale and you don’t. Just another way of stealing your money online without ever being caught.

Advantages of Using Link Cloaking

There are several advantages in using link cloaking to protect your affiliate links from ever being compromised and deter potential hackers from stealing your commissions. Here is a brief list of advantages of using link cloaking:

Encrypting Affiliate Links – As I mentioned earlier, using link cloaking is a great way to disguise your affiliate links to hackers online and keep your commissions coming to you and not the bad guy trying to steal your money. As an IT security professional, it’s only fitting that I mention this as a major benefit of using link cloaking.
Centralized Administration of Links – this is another great benefit of link cloaking. Often times, you can implement link cloaking from a central location where you can encrypt all of your affiliate links from one source. I currently utilize a Word press plug-in that allows me to link cloak all of my affiliate links whenever I post an article and I can disable link cloaking for all links with one simple click. This gives a lot of versatility for the average affiliate marketer with limited tech experience.
Prevent leaking Page Rank – One thing to know as an affiliate marketer is the fact that in rare occasions, you can leak SEO “link juice’ from your website or blog to your vendor’s site, which could lower your page rank and lessens the page authority of your website or blog. Although this is very rare, it’s best for affiliate marketers to be prudent in preventing this type of search engine de-optimization from ever happening.

And there you have it, three very powerful advantages of using link cloaking. The great thing about link cloaking, it can be used for other purposes, such as protecting other links that you don’t want hackers to compromise. You may have links to products that you own that you are promoting or maybe have others promote for you such as those on Click Bank. If you’re an affiliate marketer who wants to protect your money from being stolen by Internet thieves, I would strongly suggest you take a look into affiliate link cloaking.