What Is In Your Affiliate Tool-box? (Part 2)
RSS feeds, Aggregators, Only Wire, Link Cloaking: (Part 2)
You already know that you should cloak your affiliate links for a number of reasons. In the first place they are just plain ugly, and secondly they are frowned up on by the big G. Your clients are not as inclined to click on a link that clearly says “hop” or is obviously an affiliate link. Lastly there is the whole notion of link theft where an un-scrupulous marketer would substitute his link and steal your commissions.
There are a number of solutions to this problem which work to varying degrees. Most
of them are paid solutions which means you need to fork over a $100 bill or more to a software company and in a lot of those cases your links are being hosted off of your server. These usually allow you to track your clicks though not all of them will tell you the source of your clicks. The simple ones to avoid are the typical “URL” shorteners a few months back one of those went belly up thanks to the big G and suddenly many affiliates were left with no clicks at all.
The new full disclosure rules are also a factor in this regard. For a while I used “Pretty Link” which offered cloaking as a free part of the plug-in one day I got and update and suddenly the free version was no longer functional. It seems that WordPress.com laid down the law which prohibits cloaked links on any of their free blogs (probably to satisfy the new rulings) at the same time several other “link-cloaking” plug-in’s disappeared from the word press.org website. Go figure.
Left with out an alternative I began to search for a suitable replacement for my sites. The best one that I found is called Linktrackr. As with many others they host your links off site. The offer their services on a monthly basis with tracking and a semi decent looking link. The free account will allow you 10 free links that you can spread across your accounts. You then download a plug-in and set it up on each individual blog. You also have to go off site to configure and set up the link itself. The price is reasonable and they offer a sliding payment scale so you don’t have to pay for more links than you need at any given time. If you are looking for an inexpensive or free way to cloak up to 10 links this is probably the way to go.
Finally found what I have been looking for…UltimateAutoResponder a free link cloaking solution that I host for myself with no limit on the number of links that I can put up. The software is free with a sign-up to their list and it takes less than thirty minutes to set up. This is not an affiliate link, I don’t know these guys yet but I am looking forward to getting acquainted. Simply download the PDF and carefully follow instructions. Can you spell Cat’s Meow! I’ll have more on linking and back-links tomorrow.
Update: The free has been replaced by a “pro version” for a lot of money… you know what they say. No Fr.ee lunches
Tagged with: affiliate links • affiliate tool-box • link shorteners • ugly links
Filed under: Affiliate Programs
Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!
Great to know. I didn’t think about the fact that hosting it on my own site through the plugin could go down.