subject: Protect Your Affiliate Marketing Commissions - Cloak Your Links! [print this page] So - you've done your homework, written an amazing auto-responder email series, penned tons of great articles, and you have an really catchy landing page that pulls in lots of leads. Yet somehow you're getting almost no sales, and you don't understand why. Does this sound familiar? It's a pretty common problem, but it's unfortunately most people still haven't figured out what's causing it.
I'll try to explain a little of what's been happening to your sales throughout this article. Contrary to what you might be thinking - it is completely possible that your sales funnel is making tons of sales, you're just not seeing any of the commissions! if so, then obviously this is a pretty bad problem that you will need to take care of as soon as possible.
Basically what can be happening is this: either the user (who would have been your customer) is changing your affiliate ID to their own, or spy-ware on their computer is doing it. Either of these situations will stop you from getting credit for the sale - even though you're the one who made it. There's only one way that you can stop them from doing that - you have to cloak your links.
Link cloaking is the term applied to a process where you program a redirect on your website that hides affiliate your ID's which makes it impossible for spy-ware or users to stop you from getting sales.
You should immediately realize the difference this could make. Right now, you could be giving someone else all, or most of, your sales. Instead of making money from all the work you put into your sales funnel, you might be just handing it off to someone else.
Even if you make sales all the time without problems, it is still possible that some of them might still be stolen. It certainly won't hurt anything to start cloaking your links so you lock in the sales. The problem is that it can be hard to make a good link cloak, unless you're a programming geek (or something of that nature).
You could use one of the many link cloaking services on the internet, but I wouldn't suggest you just use the first one that you find. Some of these can actually mess up the tracking cookies, so you STILL won't get credit for the sale.
You need to make sure that you're using a cloaking service specifically designed for use in affiliate marketing - and there aren't nearly as many of those.
There are horror stories of people who used redirection services such as TinyURL and Bit.ly - apparently they are notorious for often screwing up affiliate links and not giving you credit for any sales. Most other link shortening services will have these problems as well.
The best type of link cloaker is one that you put on your own site so you don't have to worry about anything breaking down or not working properly. As I mentioned earlier though, this can be difficult to make if you aren't a programmer - or willing to pay one.
I recommend you go to the link in the resource box and get the free report about link cloaking and the best services for affiliate marketers. I don't know of any better place to learn what works, and what doesn't.
