Affiliate Link Management and Cloaking for the Affiliate Blogger (Part 1)

In Affiliate Marketing - Posted on Dec 7, 2011

December 7, 2011 · 35 comments

in Affiliate Marketing

Buffer

Management of affiliate
program links can feel
nightmarish!

Even a novice affiliate quickly has 25+ links, all with impossible to remember URLs!

Not only is it difficult to quickly whip them out of our heads and into where ever we want to share them, but its also costing us money when we can’t!

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could convert those *UGLY* URLs into far more friendly links – AND – as we blog have them auto added as links any time we forgot to link them?

Well, if you’re using WordPress, you can! We’re going to look at several affiliate link plugins for WordPress!

In fact, even if you are NOT an affiliate, you can utilize these tools to create powerful post-to-post links within your own blog, automatically, enhancing your SEO and decreasing your bounce rate!

I recently had a chance to review more than a handful of plugins, ranging from free to premium, and I’m excited to get to share these details!

There is really two very distinct parts to what I’m reviewing here, but because premium plugins bring these parts together for incredible ease of use, I’m going to cover them both here and at the same time.

The Problem With Managing Affiliate Links
And Self-Bound Links

Problem 1: Affiliate links are ugly, put off the potential buyer, hard to remember, and easily stripped of their referral data

Wow, if you’re an affiliate you know that EACH of those things is a big problem.

You may have seen other hiding their links in a link from their own domain (or a unique domain) name and wondered how it’s being done. Maybe you’ve done some reading and realized that link redirection, cloaking and masking is not only a “big deal” but generally annoying and difficult to implement. Even though I’m a tech I still found the amount of time I’d have to spend hand-editing code files to put on my server to be INSANE! For more info on redirection, cloaking and masking, check out ShoeMoney’s guide.

Fortunately, we’re gonna skip a whole lot of that rubbish! I’m going to show you how, as long as you’re okay with them being a link off of your blog domain, to make quick and easy work of this silliness.

Also, I’m going to show you a easy way to keep TRACK of all those run-away links so you can simply search for the one you need.

I think it’s pretty easy to see:

http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?B=198392&U=404774&M=24570
- vs -
http://just-ask-kim.com/recommends/thesis

Both go to the same place, both do the same thing, but one is pretty scary looking and the other builds trust with the “recommends” word I chose to use.

You and see here how a reader might be incredibly dubious of clicking that first link, and how easy it would be to strip the referral data off the link. The second link is MUCH more friendly!

Cloaking is a powerful tool both for making money and for building trust! In today’s age of relationship marketing, where each of us is called to become “Trust Agents”, this is incredibly powerful stuff!

So often we hear from things such as “how do I hide my affiliate link?”, “how do I keep someone from removing my affiliate ID from an affiliate program link?”, “how do I mask my clickbank affiliate link?”, “How can I click track all of my affiliate links to know which ones are getting viewed?” and perhaps just as importantly “how do I keep track of the hundreds of affiliate links I now have!”.

I’ve identified and tested several both paid and free affiliate link cloaking software/plugin solution’s that will handle not only the cloaking but also the management of these links in the future.

Problem 2: Blogging takes time & remembering to post your links take time and I’m fresh out of time!

{Disclaimer: This method does NOT take into account the FTC rules pertaining to affiliate link disclaimers. What I’m going to say here either assumes that you have a open disclaimer in your sidebar etc for legal compliance. You could also simply recheck the article after its been auto linked and add (affiliate link) behind each link, or some other simple solution. Check out my other pages for more info on the affiliate FTC rules. Oh yeah, and you guessed it, several of the links on this page and throughout my blog are affiliate links!}

One of the main annoyances of being an affiliate blogger is having to remember to USE the darn links!

Wouldn’t it be nice if every time I said “Joe’s Party Supply”, (even without the quotes) a link that I’d previously stored ONCE, would auto-magically detect the words and convert it into a link with the link address I gave it?

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to do this for both our links and our own posts?

Do you think you’d write with less stress on your mind if you knew that ever time you used your specified keywords, the links would be added for you? I know that I am absolutely adoring this addition to my blog!

For most of these tools it really doesn’t matter too much where the link is pointing to, as in whether or not its an affiliate link, all it cares about is that its saved its and you’ve told it where you’d like it to link in the future!

My affiliate bloggers are probably going “OMG THATS HOT!!!” right about now!

However, the rest of you that blog but are not affiliates are probably looking at me like I’ve grown three heads and wondering how in the world spending MORE time setting up stuff on your blog is going to do anything useful for you.

This comes back to SEO and the principle of creating links from our new to old pages and old to new pages. We want to keep all of our pages essentially spider webbed together via links both to increase the odds that our readers will follow them (and thus stay on our blog longer) and to make the search engines understand that our old posts are still valuable! This is traditionally something you have to do by hand and can be… to put it nicely… annoying.

So, while you may not have affiliate links (which leave your blog) to use in your posts, you certainly have all of your previous blog posts links to keep managed. (This is an SEO technique known as interlinking. You can read more about interlinking here.)

In this four part series, I’m going to introduce you to a number of solutions, some free some premium, to simplify the problem and reduce the headache!

Summary

We all know that where there is a problem there is very likely a solution!

Hopefully you can see, from your own blogging patterns, and from tips above, just how BIG of a problem all of this link management hub-bub can be!

Are affiliate and in-blog links getting the best of you? Have you been ready to pull you’re hair out keeping up with ugly links that are hard to remember? Have you wondered about how to post affiliate links without someone removing your referral ID? Have you already discovered the hard way that your affiliate IDs can be removed and that your readers just plain don’t trust ugly looking links?

I hope you’ll share your experiences with managing your links below, and stop back soon for part 2, 3 and 4 where I show you some of the possible solutions for these ills!

Kimberly Castleberry
Your Partner In Online Success

Subscribe To My Newsletter