How To Cloak Affiliate Links - How To Make Money Blogging cloak affiliate links

Hey there! Some links on this page are affiliate links which means that, if you choose to make a purchase, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I greatly appreciate your support!

If you’re serious about affiliate marketing, you must cloak or hide your affiliate links. In this post, I’ll discuss what link cloaking is and why you should cloak your affiliate links.

What is link cloaking?

Cloaking an affiliate link is disguising an affiliate link URL that is provided by the affiliate program to hide your affiliate ID.

Cloaking affiliate links protects your affiliate commissions from hijacking scripts.
Link cloaking can include your URL as a part of your link.
Link cloaking also helps you brand your URLs.

Link shortening vs link cloaking

Many people are using the terms “link shortening” and “cloaking” interchangeably but they are not the same.

Link shortening is making a link shorter. You can shorten links with bit.ly, tinyurl.com, or other link-shrinking services. Link shortening is one way to “cloak” your affiliate links and create short URLs that are easy to share.

Any form of link shortening will help you protect your affiliate links from commission hijacking.

Here’s an example of a link that is shortened with tinyurl

Did you notice how long the affiliate link is? You don't want to use these long links in your blog posts and emails!

tinyurl - link shortener can cloak your affiliate links

The link below is cloaked with Pretty Links and includes my URL

This is a CLOAKED LINK that includes my domain URL
https://profitablewebstrategies.com/prettylinks

Why you should cloak your affiliate links

Here are some of the reasons why affiliates should cloak their affiliate links:

Visitors will more likely click on a link that includes your domain than on a weird-looking affiliate link. Cloaking makes your affiliate links more appealing to visitors and will increase your click-through rate.
Cloaking protects your affiliate commissions. It disguises your affiliate link and makes your affiliate ID less visible. It hides your affiliate IDs from scripts (malware) that try to steal your commissions by replacing your affiliate link with theirs and stops these attacks.
Cloaking can increase the deliverability of your email messages that have affiliate links in them.
Most cloaking systems allow you to track your clicks so you can check your analytics and see how well your promotions are performing.
Some of the best cloaking systems can track conversions. Conversion tracking will show you which strategies work. They save you time and money on ineffective promotions.
In some affiliate management plugins and software, you can make your links “no follow” links. This is good for SEO (search engine optimization) as Google may penalize sites that have too many affiliate links. The screen image below shows how you can do that with Pretty Links.

pretty links help you cloak your affiliate links - image shows no follow settings — See some of the settings in Pretty Links, including “no follow”.

How to Manage Your Affiliate Links

In addition to cloaking, affiliate plugins help you manage your affiliate links. They store your links in one place and make it easy to find them and search for them by name.

The biggest benefit of a link management program like Pretty Links is that you can edit a URL in one place and it will update every link on your site.

This comes in very handy when a merchant changes an affiliate link. When you don’t use a link management plugin, when an affiliate link changes, you would have to edit every single link in every post where you used that link!

How to cloak your affiliate links

Several WordPress plugins cloak and manage affiliate links. Some have better tracking capabilities than others. The best cloaking and affiliate management plugins are Pretty Links and Thirsty Affiliates. They are very similar but each has a few unique things that the other one doesn’t.

What both plugins do:

Shorten your affiliate link.
The pro version of both plugins provides good link tracking.
Make it easy to edit affiliate links. Here’s why this is important: If a product link changes, you can replace all the links you have on your site for that product with the revised links by making 1 change in their system.
Both have automatic keyword linking.

How to Cloak Your Affiliate Links With Pretty Links
(Free – Pro version is $59/year)

pretty links link shortening and link cloaking

This is the plugin I’m using to cloak and manage my affiliate links. I find it very easy to use and effective. The lite version is free. You can download Pretty Links here.

These are some of the benefits Pretty Links provides that make affiliate marketing easier:

Pretty Links is very easy to use. Pretty Links’ link shortener is easier to set up than Thirsty Affiliates’ shortener.
It’s easy to cloak your links. Just add a link, customize the URL, and choose the type of redirection you want to use.
It helps you cloak, shorten, beautify, track, manage, and share your affiliate links.
You can shorten links using your own domain name. You can’t do that with link-shrinking services like tinyurl.com or bit.ly.
Tracking: You can see how many times people have clicked on a link (even in the free version).

pretty links - easy to see your clicks — You can easily see how many clicks you received on each of your links

You can manage your links easily.
It’s super easy to update your affiliate links when they changed. This happens when a merchant changes the affiliate software or affiliate network they’re using and when they change the URL of their web pages. When an affiliate URL changes, you only have to make one change in one place in Pretty Links and it will update all the links on your site for that affiliate program.
Pretty Links tracks each hit on your URL and provides a full, detailed report of where the hit came from, the browser, OS, and host.

The free version is adequate for most needs. You can download it here.

The pro version gives you additional benefits:

Advanced redirect types.
Auto-create Pretty Links.
Auto-link keywords.
You can set up link groups to organize your affiliate links.
Get support and updates.

The Pro version adds many tools and redirection types that will allow you to create pretty links automatically, replace keywords throughout your blog with Pretty Links, categorize and tag your Pretty Links, and more. You can learn more about Pretty Links here.

2 – Cloak Your Affiliate Links With Thirsty Affiliates
(Pro version is $49/year+)

Thirsty Affiliates has more features than other free link-cloaking plugins but you have to pay for some of the add-ons. The free version is good for most users. You can download Thirsty Affiliates here .

Here are a few things that you can do with Thirsty Affiliates that Pretty Links doesn’t provide:

Schedule links.
Auto health check for your links.
You can receive notifications e.g. when your links got a certain number of clicks.
Direct import of Amazon Associates settings (amazon API importing).
Geographic redirects.

You can learn more about Thirsty Affiliates here.

3 – Cloak Your Affiliate Links With WP Auto Affiliates (Free)

This free link-cloaking plugin allows you to associate certain keywords with affiliate links and then automatically cloaks them for you as a link. Some users claim it quadruples their affiliate earnings.

You can download Auto Affiliate Links here.

4- Lasso ($19/month)

Lasso alerts you when affiliate links are broken or out of stock. You can fix the URL in one place and it will update every link on your site.

Your Amazon product information is always up to date. Enter any Amazon URL and Lasso will grab the product title, image, and price automatically and update that data every 24 hours.

Cloaking your links will make you a more successful affiliate. If you haven’t done so already, start cloaking your affiliate links now!

Affiliate Marketing Resources
To Help You Jumpstart Your Affiliate Sales

There are many resources that can help you get started in affiliate marketing. The hard part is finding the right advice. It’s important to choose the right resources so you don’t get overwhelmed or confused or get inaccurate, outdated information. Below are some resources I recommend.

Would you like to learn from someone who makes $50,000 a month from affiliate marketing?

Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing.

If you want to learn affiliate marketing from someone who’s making $50,000 a month in affiliate marketing, I recommend getting Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing.

I bought Michelle’s course, Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing because I was intrigued by Michelle Schroeder’s income reports.

Even though I’ve been an affiliate marketer for many years, Michelle reminded me of some strategies I hadn’t implemented. I also found some areas I can improve on. So, I am gradually implementing some of Michele’s recommendations to increase my affiliate sales (although I’m making steady affiliate sales).

You can read my review of Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing her e. Or get Michelle’s book at her site at Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing.

Ready to Get Started in Affiliate Marketing?

Learn from someone who is making $50,000+ a month in affiliate marketing!

Recommendation #1:
Michelle’s course: Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing

If you want to learn from someone who’s making $50,000 a month in affiliate marketing, I highly recommend getting Michelle’s course, Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing.