Welcome to Secret Affiliate Commander. Today I’m going to show you exactly how link cloaking works and how it can save you hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars!

There’s no easy way to say this, so I’ll come right out with it. If you don’t cloak your affiliate links then you might as well gift your prospective purchasers ten dollars out of your wallet just for following your affiliate leads!

Crazy?

No, this isn’t the talk of a crazy, demented millionaire who just wants to give his fortune away. If you’re an affilliate, even a successful one, I’ll show you why you are actually giving away money to the people on your list and to anyone following your affiliate links in blog posts, forum posts and even your articles.

Now, that’s a bold statement. But I can assure you it is absolutely, verifiably true.

How can I be so sure?

Because I once was in the same situation you are in now. I started affiliate marketing using blog posts, article marketing, forum posting - you name it, I’ve done it. And in all my efforts I was just poking in my straight affiliate link. The sort that looks like this…
http://jpaston.getbuyers.hop.clickbank.net/

You recognize that format, don’t you? It’s a standard Clickbank code. To the layman it looks like gobbledygook and that gives affiliates like you and me a false sense of security. Because it doesn’t make sense to the reader of your blog posts etc. you assume that they can’t unravel it. But, hold on a minute, what happens when you go to the sales page? Take a look…

http://www.getmorebuyers.com/?hop=jpaston

See that ‘hop=jpaston’ at the end? Yup, it’s my Clickbank username and, of course, every Clickbank affiliate knows what follows the ‘hop=’.

Now what I found was that my prospective buyers fell into two camps. One set were relative ‘newbies’ who’d never set eyes on a Clickbank link before. They were fine - that’s where my affiliate commissions were coming from. But the others - oh, the others…

…these guys were well aware of the affiliate link. In fact a lot of them had dabbled with Clickbank already. So what they would do is substitute my affiliate link with their own Clickbank moniker. Just replace the name following the ‘hop=’ with their own.

Of course that meant that they received the affiliate commission, not me! Thanks guys!

Now I thought my conversion rates were pretty good thanks to the ‘preselling’ I was doing. But when I talked to other affiliates for the same products I realised that something was going on. Because they were converting at four of five times my rate of visitors to sales.

Then, in the midst of a discussion about which products were converting the best, one of my fellow affiliates gave me a clue - ‘you are cloaking your affiliate links, aren’t you?’ he asked.

I looked bewildered. ‘Cloaking my links - what the f***s that?’.

He went on to patiently explain. If I put my raw links into a ‘link cloaker’ application it would turn them into something unrecognisable as a Clickbank link. In fact it would look much more readable and inviting like…

http://jonathanpaston.com/introduces/GetMoreBuyers

What’s more, when my reader followed the link the ‘hop=’ wouldn’t show. He also said that this only worked in the best link cloakers. Most of them wouldn’t get rid of the ‘hop=’ and so weren’t ‘cloaking’ properly.

So which was the link cloaker he recommended? That’s simple - it’s this one…

http://secretaffiliatecommander.com

and that’s MY recommendation to you, too!