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08/22/2008: "Link Cloaking"
I want to thank you again for choosing to represent the VersaPed® foot-powered breast pump products for breastfeeding mothers. Thank you to all who have been with us for a while, and thank you to the new folks who have only recently joined.
Some of you might be long accomplished affiliate marketers, so today's message might be old news to you (or it might not), but if you are new to affiliate marketing, you might be less familiar with the term ... "Link Cloaking".
Why would someone want to cloak their links? Well, I know what I used to do before I understood affiliate marketing - thinking it would save me money, or save me privacy, or whatever, I used to dissect the links people sent me, to get to the product itself, without all the tracking info on it. At the time, being just an uninformed consumer, I thought it was saving me money, and I thought I was defeating tracking on myself. What I was actually doing was defeating the tracking for an affiliate who had rightfully earned a commission by referring me to a product. As the end purchaser, now I know it was not saving me money, and if I made any purchases, I am so sorry now for the folks I unwittingly left standing without their commissions. Thankfully, I didn't do this very many times, but I am now aware from reading affiliate marketing articles that this misunderstanding and practice by consumers is not uncommon at all.
If you know HTML and you want to set up forwarding pages from your own web site, you can effectively cloak your own links, but that is a bit of work. Luckily, there are free services online that can do this quickly and easily for you, and the added bonus is you get a link to share that is short and sweet. You can leave your long links behind, which don't always fit in the fill in forms on advertiser web sites anyway. (Caveat - if you use Google Adwords, read the fine print about landing pages "matching" the domain name of your link.) But if you blog, have a mailing list of your own, participate in forums and online communities, or use any of the dozens of online classified ad sites (more on that in a future post), these short little URL redirects are extremely handy.
One that's been around a while is TinyURL.com. This one has been around quite a long time, and it's very quick and easy. If you want to keep track of your URL's, though, you really have to e-mail them to yourself so you don't lose them.
Another one I've recently discovered is a.dg. I have not yet figured out what a.gd stands for, unless it's "A Great Deal"! ;-) but it is a great little free service that keeps track of your links for you.
Thanks again for being part of the VersaPed® program.
Have a wonderful day!
