Why should you cloak your links?
The revenue you earn as an affiliate depends entirely on how you share referral links with your users.
Many fraudsters are sending spammy links to users to steal their money. Thus users are more aware of the dangers of clicking on spammy links.
So, you should cloak your links to increase the chances of getting clicks. By cloaking your links, you make them look more professional and less like spam or fraud. This makes it more likely that the user will trust and click on the link.
Hence, you must cloak your links to protect your affiliate revenue completely.
Table of Contents
What is Link Cloaking?
Before we get too deep into this article, let’s understand link cloaking.
Link cloaking helps you convert your long, ugly-looking affiliate links into short and pretty ones. The cloaked link redirects the user to the intended affiliate link when clicked.
This is a valuable feature if you want to improve your affiliate links’ visibility on the web. By cloaking your affiliate links, you can make them look more like regular links and improve the chances of them being clicked by visitors.
Importance of Link Cloaking
There are a lot of articles and resources about the importance and benefits of link cloaking.
As Yoast explains, link cloaking is used to hide that you are an affiliate. Following are the primary reasons why affiliate links should be cloaked:
Clean Affiliate Links
Link cloaking helps you convert your long, ugly affiliate link into a neat, clean, genuine one.
For Example,
Your Affiliate Link: https://domain.com/product=BQd431?affiliate=1234
Below is an example of a Cloaked Affiliate link:
Cloaked Affiliate Link: https://yourwebsite.com/go/affiliatesite/
Don’t your cloaked links seem more appealing and genuine than your existing affiliate links?
Yes. Cloaked links look more attractive.
Build Trust with Your Audience
Link cloaking helps you improve your organic search engine rankings and overall credibility among your readers. It provides clean and genuine affiliate links, which builds trust and transparency between you and your readers to strengthen the relationship and increase conversion chances.
Easier to Share
Because the cloaked links are easier to read and share and look cleaner than uncloaked links, they are ideal for social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, where followers expect high-quality content.
Search Engine Ranking
Cloaked affiliate links are links that look neat and clean to the public. Affiliate marketers use them to improve their SEO ranking, as search engines consider these links positive signals.
Improves Email Delivery Rate
Another great reason to cloak affiliate links is to improve the email delivery rate.
Emails that contain ugly affiliate links are often marked as spam. Professionals always recommend using cloaked affiliate links in your email marketing campaigns, as it is more secure and does not result in spammy results.
Easy Management of Affiliate Links
Link cloaking is a feature that helps you manage your affiliate links better. Additionally, link cloaking makes it easier for you to track the performance of your affiliate links.
Imagine that you are using an affiliate link in your 100 articles. But your affiliate manager has changed the affiliate links.
Will you manually change the links in all 100 articles, and what if you missed updating links in a few articles?
It’s terrible to click on a dead affiliate link. It leads to a poor user experience. Fortunately, Link Cloaking can help here as well. You need to update your affiliate link in the link cloaking plugin, and you’re done.
Overall, link cloaking is an essential tool that helps you keep all your affiliate links in check and transparently manage their visibility.
Cloak Affiliate Links using WordPress Plugins
Many WordPress plugins enable you to cloak affiliate links effectively.
These are the three best WordPress plugins that can be used to cloak affiliate links in WordPress quickly and maximize their benefits:
1. ThirstyAffiliates
With ThirstyAffiliates, you can easily cloak your affiliate links in just a few simple steps without worrying about complications. The plugin offers free and premium versions, so there’s no excuse not to get started immediately!
ThirstyAffiliates uses the link title as anchor text by default, but you can edit it.
2. Easy Affiliate Links
Here is another cloaking link for the WordPress plugin. Easy Affiliate Links make managing and cloaking your affiliate links easy. Dashboard of Easy Affiliate Links has features to help you manage all your affiliate links in one place.
3. Pretty Link
Pretty Link can track the number of clicks a link receives and the number of unique clicks per link. This helps you keep an eye on which links are performing better and which ones you may need to tweak or redirect to improve the overall quality of your site.
Recommended Tutorials for Further Reading:
- YouTube Video SEO
- Create SEO Friendly Title Tags
- 9 Best Online Tools To Create Favicon
- Google AdSense Mistakes
Conclusion
Link cloaking can be used for various reasons, such as easy management of affiliate links, building trust with your audience, or improving email delivery rate.
In short, cloaking allows bloggers to protect their affiliate relationships and promote responsible affiliate marketing.