Start to Cloak Your Affiliate Links for Free Right Now!
As affiliate marketing grows in popularity, the number of services that have cropped up offering ways in which to cloak affiliate links have multiplied too. At the end of the day, you're going to want to cloak your affiliate links in some way or other, but the downside of doing so for most beginners lies in the simple fact that most link cloakers actually cost quite a bit to obtain. In fact, you could very well find yourself paying upwards of $60 for even the most basic of link cloakers.
Fortunately, there is a method that will enable you to cloak all your affiliate links for free right now! Admittedly, this method wasn't originally designed to be used as an affiliate link cloaker, but it really does serve the purpose with distinction. If you're wondering what we're talking about, then prepare for a surprise because we're going to be using URL 'simplifiers' in order to cloak affiliate links!
Have you heard of URL 'simplifiers' before? Essentially, they take a long and complicated URL such as 'http://www.yourwebsite.com/folder1/folder2/folder3/realylongname.html and 'simplify' it into something a lot shorter. Essentially this makes links a lot more manageable and it means that you'll be able to quickly link to various sites without having to worry about humongous URL lengths!
Some services that offer this type of function would be tinyurl.com and bit.ly. Both of these would churn out URLs that look something like: http://tinyurl.com/dnjer or http://bit.ly/anyname. As you can see, they're both pretty short, and they'll essentially 'hide' your affiliate link from sight - to a degree.
As you might have expected, these free techniques of cloaking affiliate links are far from foolproof. For starters, they're only going to cloak your URL up to the point when someone actually clicks on it. Once clicked, the new page that is displayed will actually have its complete URL displayed as well, which means that it is just as open to abuse as ever.
Similarly, while shortening URLs is completely acceptable for some purposes, people are starting to wise up and if you seem to shorten URLs for no real reason, they would probably instantly suspect that you're directing them to an affiliate product. Needless to say, this could defeat the entire purpose of you cloaking your links to begin with!
Due to the fact that this method of cloaking affiliate links only offers a partial protection at best, it is really just a small stop-gap measure that can be used for true beginners. Anyone who is really seeking to make the most out of their affiliate marketing should not bother with this type of method, and instead should look for the real deal as far as link cloakers are concerned.
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