One reason affiliates lose commissions is because they don’t cloak their affiliate links.
Most affiliate links are long and ugly. If you’ve been online for very long, you can easily tell the difference between a regular link and an affiliate link.
Anytime you use a blatant affiliate link, your potential buyers may feel resistance and avoid clicking your link.
Furthermore:
- Long affiliate links sent in an email can “break” and become un-clickable.
- ClickBank affiliate links can be easily hi-jacked by other CB affiliates.
It’s for all these reasons and more that I recommend all affiliates use a high-quality link cloaker and link tracker.
My Quest to Find a Good Link Cloaker
I’ve tried a number of link cloaking solutions through the years.
Probably the cheapest method is to modify your .htaccess file. It’s free. But… you don’t get any consolidated statistics, and modifying the .htaccess file can be risky. (I used this technique on one of my sites, but had somebody else do it because I don’t know how.)
I’ve also tried paid WordPress plugins as well as a paid link cloaking service. The paid service was good in theory, but in practice it caused me a lot of headaches. Because of the constant errors, I canceled after about 4 months.
I share all this with you because it’s important that you know that I’ve been trying to find a good link cloaker for YEARS! And I think I’ve finally found it…
The Best Link Cloaker?
Thanks to Michel Fortin, I discovered a new link cloaking and link tracking service that I’ve fallen in love with! It’s called LinkTrackr.
This service not only cloaks your links, but also provides you with consolidated link tracking statistics on a slick dashboard. Here’s a screen shot:
But what I like most about the service is this:
You can register a domain and have ALL your affiliate links use the same domain.
For example, I registered clickora.com for my affiliate links. I then set the nameservers to point to LinkTrackr. Now, whenever I set up a new affiliate link, it looks like this:
After the .com, I can put any text I want. This makes all my links short and difficult to circumvent. And all my link tracking stats are in a single place!
What’s more, the week I started using the service, my affiliate commissions started to go up. This has been the single biggest benefit for me. The tool pays for itself.
Free or Paid… You Choose!
Another thing I think you’ll appreciate about LinkTrackr is that you can use their free service or their paid service.
I started with the free service, but upgraded immediately to the paid service so I could use my own domain for all my redirects.
To sign up for a free account (or paid account), please click this link. Yes, it’s my affiliate link and I will get a commission if you sign up for the paid service.
-Ryan M. Healy
About Ryan M. Healy
Ryan Healy is a direct response copywriter. Since 2002, he has worked with scores of clients, including BoostCTR, Alex Mandossian, Terry Dean, and Pulte Homes. He writes a popular blog about copywriting, advertising, and business growth, has been featured in publications like Feed Front magazine, and is a regular contributor to WordStream.com, BoostCTR.com, and MarketingForSuccess.com.
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Sorry to disagree with you here, Ryan, but if a webmaster is using WordPress, there are much better, cheaper, and more robust alternatives to solutions such as LinkTrackr.
Here’s one:
Use GoCodes for link redirection. It’ll allow you to have links like http://www.ryanhealy.com/recommends/linktrackr
Then use Google Analytics for WordPress by Yoast and set it to register all clicks on links that begin with /recommends/. That way you’ll get real reliable reporting for your affiliate links by Google Analytics. You can do wonders with this data.
You see, this alternative costs zero dollars and you maintain full ownership and control of your links.
I haven’t tested LinkTrackr’s analytics abilities, but I doubt it’s as good as Google’s. Website analytics isn’t an easy thing to get right.
M.K. – You may be right.
What I like is that I can use one domain for all my redirects — no matter what market I’m promoting in. (I have sites and email lists in multiple markets.)
Plus, all link tracking stats are consolidated into one dashboard. Here’s one of the pie charts:
https://skitch.com/ryanhealy/ri27s/dashboard-ryan-healy
I also really like the viral bar. When this option is checked off, a social media viral bar appears at the top of the page you linked to. If you go here, you’ll see it in action:
http://clickora.com/linktrackr
LinkTrackr also has conversion tracking and affiliate TID tracking — although I’ve not used those features yet.
Obviously, with so many link cloaking and tracking solutions, everybody will have different tastes. So far, LinkTrackr is my favorite.
why would you want to use one domain for multiple niche tracking? this “trick” is actually a disservice to you click conversion ratio. What do you think?
short urls should be used invisibly people need to see the actual link of the page they’re visiting as too many people use re-directs to spam or retrieve / steal data (e..g. phishing sites)
Actually, I made more as an affiliate in March than I ever have before. I attribute part of the increase to using LinkTrackr.
Everybody will have a different preference on how to cloak links — and that’s fine.
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