5 Tools you need for Effective Affiliate Marketing-2
Posted on : 23-11-2009 | By : rituraj | In : Affiliate Marketing, Online Business
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This is the second part of series 5 Tools you need for Effective Affiliate 
Marketing, if you are new here, you can read the first part here at: 5 Tools you need for Effective Affiliate Marketing-1
Cloaking: you should know the importance of clocking… oh …oh… oh, sorry I thought you know about everything. 
Let’s know what is cloaking? Cloaking is the word first used in the world of search engine optimization. It is a black hat SEO practice in which search engine bots and real world visitors are presented with different copies of a same website or webpage. The reason behind this was to betray search engines to gain higher rankings for some related keywords.
Now the question arises why that was done. Actually in olden days (not so old, just like 3, 4 years ago) search engines doesn’t had very sophisticated algorithms and which can be easily re-engineered to gain undeserved profit by some black hat marketers.
Some of the factors were keyword density, use of the specific keyword in the title tags, h1 tags etc. At that time there were fewer variables which were considered for ranking of a webpage. But as time passed search engines became smarter (black hat marketers too) and now these techniques doesn’t work. (And it should not because it was being happily appreciating wrong doers.) And the search engine algorithm has become much smarter and advance evaluating hundreds of factors while ranking any webpage.
Now when we talk about cloaking in affiliate marketing or affiliate links clocking, it is not related with search engines and something other than betraying however the reason behind is the same.
Actually the affiliate links are something like carrying a lot of variables, thus making it a mess. It does not give clear information where it is going to lead the clicker.
Example of affiliate links:
http://www.somewebsite.com/index.php?someid=some-numerical-value?sid=some-alphanumeric-value?trackid=some-numerical-value
For an example like an affiliate link of ClickBank:
http://AFFILIATE.VENDOR.hop.clickbank.net
It lefts the visitor in an illusion so as where are they going after clicking that link, and in this way the click through rate (in an easy word the chances the link will be clicked) becomes very less.
So we cloak the link to something meaningful, at least in the eyes of the visitors. Like
http://www.yourwebsite.com/go/xyzproduct.html
http://www.yourwebsite.com/go/xyzproduct.php
http://www.yourwebsite.com/recommends/xyzproduct.html
http://www.yourwebsite.com/recommends/xyzproduct.php
http://www.yourwebsite.com/xyzproduct.html
http://www.yourwebsite.com/xyzproduct.php
So it was the first reason which was user connected. Now there is second reason and that is affiliate commission theft.
Some users, who visit the affiliate website, eventually are also the affiliates of the network of which the website owner is, so they can change the affiliate link to have the commission themselves for the product they are purchasing, that leads to affiliate commission theft.
So cloaking is essential for a successful affiliate marketing campaign.
There are several ways by which cloaking can be done. There are several tools and websites available using which cloaking can be done. But the easiest and most effective way is using redirecting script on your own webserver.
You can use HTML, PHP or JavaScript for redirecting visitors to your affiliate links
Redirection with meta refresh tag
Make a page with a name relevant to the product, for an example xyz.html And use the following code in between <head> and </head> tag
<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0; url=http://youraffiliatelink”>
Now upload the page to any folder or root of your domain and link your affiliate link to the same.
Like:
http://www.yourdomain.com/xyz.html
and when clicked it will redirect the visitor to the affiliate link. In this way you can hide your affiliate links.
Redirection with JavaScript.
<HEAD>
<SCRIPT language=”JavaScript”>
<!–
window.location=”your affiliate link here”;
//–>
</SCRIPT>
</HEAD>
There is an other way to hide your affiliate link visually:
<a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com/xyz.html”
onmouseover=”window.status=http://www.yourdomain.com/‘; return true;” onmouseout=”window.status=”; return true;”>Click Here</a>
If you use this code and when the website visitor hover mouse over the link it will not show the affiliate link instead it will show the url which you set in the window status.
This techniques can hide the link visually, means if any one wants to see the actual link, they can do this by viewing page source.
The only problem is if the user has turned off the JavaScript, this code may not work properly.
Redirection with PHP
<?
header(”Location: http://www.yourdomain.com/xyz.html“);
?>
How to add and use the redirect code:
Make a simple html or PHP page and name it related to the product you are promoting.
Like if your are redirecting the clicker to a product named Dreams Come True. Make a page and name it dreamscometrue.html, and upload it to your root folder, so that it makes a url like.
http://www.yourwebsite.com/dreamcomestrue.html
Now use the appropriate redirection code in the dreamscometrue.html page. I personally use and prefer JavaScript redirection. So I will write something like:
<HEAD>
<SCRIPT>
<!–
window.location=”your affiliate link here”;
//–>
</SCRIPT>
</HEAD>
Save the page and upload it to the root folder, now wherever you have to insert your affiliate link, use the link http://www.yourwebsite.com/dreamcomestrue.html, and whenever user will click on it, they will be redirected to your affiliate page.
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online, if done right and using correct tools. There are many things which should be kept in mind while starting in affiliate marketing. Starting from the beginning choosing right market, choosing right keywords is very essential for establishing and running an effective and profitable campaign.
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