Just the other day I was looking through the stats from one of my affiliate marketing campaigns and noticed that I was suddenly converting at under 5%. Considering I was using a sales funnel that had been tested again and again to convert over 40% – I was extremely confused. Of course I double checked all of the statistics and assumed it would pick up in a day or two. Well a week passed.
It STAYED at under 5% conversion.
I just couldn’t figure out why it was converting so low. I decided to ask one of my online friends who was an established internet marketer and he just laughed and said, ‘you aren’t using anything to cloak your links, are you?’
Unfortunately I wasn’t, I actually had no idea how to cloak my links or why I should. After asking him a little more about it I figured out why you should always cloak your affiliate links – people and programs will change your affiliate link to their own and steal your commissions! There is a type of spyware that does just that, whenever a user visits a ClickBank product (as well as other affiliate programs), it replaces the referrer ID with the spyware creator’s.
That means I was basically handing over all of my commissions to this thief. The worst part is that I had lost a few days of sells already, I wish I had known about cloaking links before that points. There are a bunch of ways to cloak links, but some break the cookies while others screw up the redirect.
If you aren’t positive of your sales being genuine and correct, it may be that someone is stealing your commissions. This is especially true if you’ve recently noticed a drop in sales, or if your campaigns are performing well under your expectations. It isn’t extremely hard to find a guide about link cloaking, but most don’t take affiliate marketing into account and might screw up the cookies so you STILL don’t get commissions.
Other than link cloaking there isn’t a definitive way to stop others from hijacking your affiliate links. Luckily you can implement a cloak on your links within minutes, you just need to find a good cloak. The problem definitely isn’t a lack of available programs – it’s a lack of programs that actually work and get you the sale.
You can split test your campaign a thousand times and set up brilliant sales funnels, but it won’t make a difference if you aren’t using a good link cloaking program or service.
Discover more about link cloaking in the free Cloak and Dagger Affiliate Secrets report. Feel free to distribute this article in any form as long as you include this resource box. You can also include your affiliate link if you sign up at Clickbank Pirate.
