Cloaking Your Links

If you use the Affiliate Link Generator (see left) then your Clickbank hoplink will be invisible to the surfer when they visit our pitch page, that's due to some clever code we added to protect your links integrity.

I'm going to use a a fictional Clickbank ID of muscle1111 to explain further..

If you use the link generator when the potential customer ends up at our pitch page, instead of seeing something like this:

http://www.bodybuildingrevealed.com/index.php?hop=muscle1111

The visitor will only see this :

http://www.bodybuildingrevealed.com

Looks a hell of a lot neater and discourages a sneaky affiliate from over writing your hoplink data.

However that's at our end - you might like to consider cloaking your affiliate links at your end as well.

The Basics..

For example if your placing your affiliate link on a web site or blog don't ever make the visible link look like this :

http://musclehead.bbrevealed.hop.clickbank.net/

Do it like this : "Click Here For Bodybuilding Revealed"

So you're not displaying your affiliate URL but when they click on the link it still goes to your Clickbank Hoplink.

The Next Steps ..

Now there are numerous ways you can properly cloak your affiliate URL.

Register your own domain

Probably the best way is to go and purchase a domain (Godaddy.com) are pretty cheap , call it something like "BodybuildingRevealedProgram.com" or whatever, it doesn't even have to specifically match our domain, you could call it "musclebuildingsolution.com" or something.

Now once you have purchased your domain you need to do two things. Login to your domain management account and go to "Forwarding" then simply enter your entire Clickbank hoplink " what this now means is that instead of having to use your actual hoplink you can just add your domain everywhere and it will automatically forward to your hoplink. If you created your hoplink using our link generator , even better, as your hoplink data won't even show when the user reaches our pitch page.

NOTE TO PPC folks, you will also need to enable "masking" which means as well as redirecting to your hoplink, your domain name will still show in the URL bar "masking" our pitch pages URL. You need to do this because recently Google stopped multiple advertisers from using the same link so this will allow your advert to still get shown.

Other Options

Tiny URL

Another way you can simply mask your URL is a service like www.tinyurl.com . With their service you can enter your hoplink URL and get it turned into an encrypted link which will cloak your link for you. It's free and quick, it's a decent solution but it's not as good as having your own domain name.

What Else..

Well there are numerous other options, you can create what is known as a ht access file which will allow you to make dozens of different types of affiliate links , especially useful if you use TID references a lot. To find out more type "cloaking affiliate link" into google, you'll soon find plenty of different mechanism for achieving the same result.

Is it worth doing, yes it probably is, although in the fitness industry it's nothing like the problem it is in the Internet Marketing industry, you can still have your links stolen by other fitness based affiliates.