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You Need To Count And Cloak Affiliate Links

By Thomas Christopher

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Published: 10Aug2009
Word count: 671
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If you see a picture of a book cover on somebody's page with the title and Amazon price beneath it, you can click and buy the item. The owner of the page will get a piddling little share of the money that you spend at Amazon -- 4% or 6% of the purchase price. That linked picture is called an affiliate link. Most affiliate programs offer a robust 30%-50% of sales. Other kinds of affiliate links lead to pages where you can sign-up for more information. Again, whoever placed the link on his or her page will be paid for your sign-up.

You can easily become an affiliate for a great many products and services. If you do, and you want to make money at it, you will need to learn about link counting and link cloaking.

You may have links to the same sites many places, with differing text and images to entice people with the benefits of the product or service you are recommending. You need to know which links they are actually following, which pitches work; otherwise you are wasting opportunities. That means you need to count how many times each link is followed. The aWeber auto responder can count clicks through the emails you send to your list. Google Analytics can overlay a view of your page with the counts. You can find software to do it for any link.

Link cloaking means hiding the fact that a link is an affiliate link and not just a common hyperlink.

It's the common folklore, almost certainly true, that you will lose a lot of affiliate sales if you don't hide the fact that a link is an affiliate link, that people will go out of their way to remove your affiliate information from the link before they use it. I believe it. I've done it myself. I've done it with the gleeful feeling of, "I'll show you."

Why do we do such things? Why do we make it necessary to use services such as tinyURL.com that allow us to cloak our affiliate links under the pretext we're just making the link shorter so will fit on the line better?

Perhaps it comes from the mixing of relationships. We distinguish between commercial interactions and casual, friendly interactions. It's always annoying when we want to just chat with somebody, and they say, "You need to buy my book." It's quite a conversation stopper.

But really, there's no harm in using somebody's affiliate link. This is not a zero-sum game. It doesn't cost us anything. And it doesn't harm the purveyor of the goods or services: they've already counted affiliate sales into their business plan.

And what about the people who have provided us with the affiliate links? Are they unworthy of receiving money? They presumably have researched the product. They found it for us. If we don't trust their judgment, why are we buying the thing anyway? I think it's time to start a campaign: "Friends Use Friends Affiliate Links."

I must admit that I'm ambivalent about it all. I have been so annoyed by people who try to sell during a casual conversation that in conversation I'll just give away information freely while chatting. I may say, "There's really not enough time to get into the nitty-gritty, so if you do want more information, I'll tell you where you can get it." Similarly, in speeches and civic clubs, I restrict my selling to "Here's how to get some more information." I can't, however, claim that this is the best possible business tactic.

Anyway, in this world we need to cloak affiliate links. The link counting in aWeber emails automatically cloaks them. You can use tinyURL.com to cloak other links. If you don't trust the reliability of tinyURL.com for your web pages, you can put software on your own server to cloak and count the links.

In any event, when you decide to get serious about affiliate marketing, you will need to count and to cloak your affiliate links.

Dr. Christopher is offering a growing collection of online income stream courses and ebooks directed at speakers, writers, and self-employed professionals. Dr. Christopher, a Colorado public speaker and seminar leader, prepared these in response to requests from the Speakers In Colorado group.

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