1) They are prettier and easier to read. Not only are they shorter (so they fit into an email message without wrapping), but they also are more pleasing to the eye.

2) They don’t get hijacked. This may not a problem in a niche market, but if you sell a marketing product, always cloak your link. Otherwise some people change it to their link – and earn the affiliate commission themselves. This is  especially a problem with Clickbank products, since thousands of people are Clickbank affiliates.

3) You can change the end result of a cloaked link and no one knows. For example, if you find out the hosting company you’ve been recommending is no longer the one you want to recommend, you just change the cloaked link. People who were going to yourdomain.com/recommends/hosting – still go there.But they end up at a different destination.

No need to change article links, blog links, links in your ebooks. If you had “hard-coded” those affiliate links, they would still be going to an old program – who might even have changed THEIR affiliate program and your links don’t even work any more!

4) A cloaked link is easier to remember. For example, I can’t remember

http://members.marketingmakeovergenerator.com/specialinfo.asp?x=355162

but I can remember this:

http://www.techtamers.com/recommends/MMO or http://mylandingpagegenerator.com

Likewise, if you are on a teleseminar or webinar and you say the link, it’s easier for someone to type. That’s one of the biggest advantages of domain redirects of your affiliate links – easy to recall.

5) Basically you maintain control of the links on your site. So you also get the “link love” of sending more traffic to your site (before they are redirected to another site).

You can cloak links with a cloaker – my preferred one is Jim Edward’s affiliate link cloaker (I think it’s a CB product) – my cloaked link? http://techtamers.com/cloaker.htm (see how easy that is to remember?)

While you can use tinyurl.com or some of the other “link shortening sites” for short-term cloaked links, don’t use it for long-term items such as an ebook. Tinyurl links often “disappear” after a time – so people can’t get to them.

When it’s a really important link, I use a redirected domain name. For example, I have TheShoppingSystem.com, MySecretCopywriter.com, MyWritingService.com, AffiliateToolboxGenerator.com – and a whole host of others.

These are products or services that I recommend frequently and rather than try to remember a link, it not only “speaks” better but it sounds more credible to use a domain name. It’s as if it’s my own. In fact, I have TechTamersHosting.com and TechTamersDomains.com – putting my company name into them.

When you take your affiliate marketing seriously, you want to cloak your links. Is there ever a time NOT to cloak? Not to my way of thinking. Cloak those links!

—–

Dr. Jeanette Cates is an Internet Strategist who works with new Online Business owners. If you’re new to affiliate marketing, you’ll get everything you need (including a link cloaking program) with Affiliate Success Training.