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If you are an Affiliate Marketer, it is frightening the percentage of affiliate commissions that are outright stolen, all because the affiliate marketer was either blissfully unaware that this practice exists and that there is an software capable of  cloaking affiliate links.

Yes, the word is that there are unscrupulous affiliates that steal your hard earned commissions by whatever means available...

In my travels I have found lots of different link cloaking sites, where you can cloak affiliate links  for "Free", only to find that when I tested the links they came up blank... Google actually came back with a page that had a lot of gobbley gook written on it and my link went nowhere!

Cloaking your affiliate links is a good way to keep people from stealing your commissions.

Affiliate Problem #1; 

Most of affiliate links given to you by merchants or CPA networks are just too obvious.

Do any of these look familiar to you?

http://iamthedummyaffiliate.greatproduct.hop.clickbank.net

http://www.anothergreatproduct.com/?affID=123456

http://dummy-affiliate.com/script?a=987654&Id=34D123U456M789B

http://www.dummyaffiliatelink.com/?cometakemycommission=yes&affiliatedummyID=johnnybroke

The negative effect is that these links make potential customers wary of buying and they might totally ignore your link and bypass it. This means you have just a lost sale!

Affiliate Problem #2;

Dishonest affiliates are able to steal your commissions.

There numerous other devious methods being used by affiliate to steal your commissions. When your naked affiliate link and the network you are part of is revealed, there are programs like PPC Bully, that can take advantage of this by dissecting your keywords and advertising campaigns which you have paid for and done all the expensive split testing. They use your hard work to rewrite the successful campaigns and with it pocket your commissions.

Google doesn't look favourably at affiliate marketers. The policies Google have in their AdWords system limiting your ad from being displayed if there are other affiliates using the raw affiliate link that is very similar to yours. This means you get less traffic and exposure, thereby reducing overall sales. Another reason is that it drives the bidding war for PPC up instead of down, costing you more in PPC Advertising.

There numerous other devious methods being used by affiliates to steal your commissions. Some of these are very technical in nature, and they use ingenious methods like cookie stuffing in forums and other places that results in commissions being stolen from you.

Affiliate Problem #3;

The biggest problem you have with the "Free" Link Cloaking software or sites that offer a tool, is the biggest money loser... even if you get past the dishonest affiliates and the distrusting customers you still have the problem of "Free" Cloaked Links loosing the capability or just unable to drop cookies on the customers computer which means you won't get paid no matter what, and the worst part is you won't even know about it.

Affiliate Problem #4;

If you are losing commissions due to a low converting product sales page. The best way to make sure you convert your clicks is to send your potential customer to a landing page on your site. Affiliate Link Cloaking Software needs to capable of doing this.

For this you need software that can send your customer to a landing page on your own site.... sell them the product yourself and when you have them ready to buy it is a simple click away from the program you are wanting them to go to with your affiliate link in tact.

It’s never too late to recover from this situation and to start putting that money back into your own pocket.

A few affiliates just use simple link cloaking where you create another HTML file and just have a redirect script on the new page. That's all fine, but it is very basic cloaking and is easily detected.

What you need to go truly hi-tech without having to learn how to do the scripting ... I did, and as the man who bought the Remington Electric Company said… “I liked the product so much I bought the company”…. Only for me, I became an affiliate!

You can now take advantage of an equally ingenious and exceptional Affiliate Link Cloaking Software that not only cloaks your affiliate links but tracks them as well.

This is the software solution that I use personally.

This is a product from Mike Filsaime "Power Link Generator" - it is hosted on my own server and easy to install. The initial issues I had with this software was that once I had a few links built up and it spilled over to the 2nd page, the page would not display. I contacted Mike's helpdesk support and was treated to 1st Class service. The problem was fixed in less than 24 hours.

The advantages of this software is that you get a full and comprehensive picture of your links - you can edit your links at any time, you can reset your stats and if you want to do split testing you can clone the link and make the relative changes.

The software is not cheap, but for the value of what it does, I can highly recommend it.

Below is a backoffice look at a "Dummy Campaign" from Power Link Generator

Campaign Name : InsiderSecrets Delete   Edit  Clone   Hide details Created: 2009-07-09  Last Modified : 2009-07-09

Total Clicks : 27       Link Type : Redirect

URL    :

Goes To ->http://www.WEBSITEYOUPROMOTE.com/t.cgi/YOURAFFID/

Campaign Name : InsiderSecrets   Delete   Edit  Clone   Show details Created: 2009-07-09  Last Modified : 2009-07-09

Total Clicks : 27       Link Type : Redirect

URL    :

Goes To ->http://www.marketingtips.com/t.cgi/1433250/coursetrial