Using Affiliate Links? Think Twice...
Many top marketers swear by cloaked links (despite a few possible legal issues and other problems), but I encourage everyone to give cloaked links a second thought to see if they're really necessary -- or if they might even be hurting you. When affiliate links first came out, I can easily see how it was the smart choice to go with, but that was before people knew what they were. I did some testing on a few niches of mine and got some interesting results.
For those of you new to this, a cloaked link just redirects a link from you to an affiliate link of yours. So instead of someone seeing something like http://hoplink.whoever.clickbank.net/hop?63038 they'd just see something like http://www.yoursite.com/anyproductB. The second link would then redirect to the affiliate link.
The advantage that many marketers claim is that people are wary of affiliate links and might not click on it because they either don't like giving you credit for the sale (and type in the link itself) or they try to steal the commission from you by entering their own affiliate ID.
I usually don't use cloaked links for a variety of reasons, but I was motivated to do some testing and got some interesting results back that I thought I'd share.
In my non IM niches, I usually saw either a slight decrease or no difference at all. However, I actually noticed a very significant decrease in click throughs (by not quite 50%) in one of my niches. I replicated these results over again just to make sure it wasn't a fluke and got the same results.
For two IM niches, I didn't notice any difference at all (these links were on my site -- not in a message or anything like that).
With e-mail messages, I also tested both IM and non-IM niches. The non-IM niches showed little difference (so a bit better than when they were on a site) as long as the affiliate code was not bluntly shown as the link (so have different text saying "click here for this" instead of the actual affiliate link being shown, but still having the normal affiliate link without it being cloaked).
The IM niches showed a slight increase with cloaked links in e-mails, but it wasn't too drastic.
This goes a bit against what some people assume, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. If someone is intent on stealing your commission for a product, I don't think a cloaked link would stop many of them from doing so. On top of that, most internet marketers know about cloaked links and how to spot one. If they want to steal your commission for their own, they will. Outside of the internet marketing field, it would make sense that it wouldn't make a huge difference anyway.
The big decrease when using a cloaked link in one of my niches also made sense too. If you have a merchant as an affiliate, some people might be a bit wary if they look and see that the link appears to be to your own site or some odd domain name that they don't recognize. I don't think that you should have a visible affiliate link bluntly in the middle of your webpage, but putting a naked affiliate link there as a text link with the text not displaying the affiliate link appeared to work much better than a cloaked link in at least one case.
In other instances, they appeared to have little to no difference. The only difference I noted that was a bit more in favor of cloaked links was in e-mail messages.
Now I realize that this obviously changes from niche to niche and whether you're doing a post on your own site vs a message board (where a normal affiliate link would be a very bad idea in most cases), but it made me think a bit more about this. I encourage you to give it a little thought yourself and to perhaps do some testing first before following what others have said.
I've noticed that a few people are starting to realize what I've been talking about here and how cloaked links aren't always the best choice and can even hurt sales in some cases.
For those of you new to this, a cloaked link just redirects a link from you to an affiliate link of yours. So instead of someone seeing something like http://hoplink.whoever.clickbank.net/hop?63038 they'd just see something like http://www.yoursite.com/anyproductB. The second link would then redirect to the affiliate link.
The advantage that many marketers claim is that people are wary of affiliate links and might not click on it because they either don't like giving you credit for the sale (and type in the link itself) or they try to steal the commission from you by entering their own affiliate ID.
I usually don't use cloaked links for a variety of reasons, but I was motivated to do some testing and got some interesting results back that I thought I'd share.
In my non IM niches, I usually saw either a slight decrease or no difference at all. However, I actually noticed a very significant decrease in click throughs (by not quite 50%) in one of my niches. I replicated these results over again just to make sure it wasn't a fluke and got the same results.
For two IM niches, I didn't notice any difference at all (these links were on my site -- not in a message or anything like that).
With e-mail messages, I also tested both IM and non-IM niches. The non-IM niches showed little difference (so a bit better than when they were on a site) as long as the affiliate code was not bluntly shown as the link (so have different text saying "click here for this" instead of the actual affiliate link being shown, but still having the normal affiliate link without it being cloaked).
The IM niches showed a slight increase with cloaked links in e-mails, but it wasn't too drastic.
This goes a bit against what some people assume, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. If someone is intent on stealing your commission for a product, I don't think a cloaked link would stop many of them from doing so. On top of that, most internet marketers know about cloaked links and how to spot one. If they want to steal your commission for their own, they will. Outside of the internet marketing field, it would make sense that it wouldn't make a huge difference anyway.
The big decrease when using a cloaked link in one of my niches also made sense too. If you have a merchant as an affiliate, some people might be a bit wary if they look and see that the link appears to be to your own site or some odd domain name that they don't recognize. I don't think that you should have a visible affiliate link bluntly in the middle of your webpage, but putting a naked affiliate link there as a text link with the text not displaying the affiliate link appeared to work much better than a cloaked link in at least one case.
In other instances, they appeared to have little to no difference. The only difference I noted that was a bit more in favor of cloaked links was in e-mail messages.
Now I realize that this obviously changes from niche to niche and whether you're doing a post on your own site vs a message board (where a normal affiliate link would be a very bad idea in most cases), but it made me think a bit more about this. I encourage you to give it a little thought yourself and to perhaps do some testing first before following what others have said.
I've noticed that a few people are starting to realize what I've been talking about here and how cloaked links aren't always the best choice and can even hurt sales in some cases.
posted by LeadEvolution Team at
7:16 PM
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