Affiliate Fire Extinguisher – Stop your commissions being burned!
Hide Your Affiliate Links SAFELY
If you’re not familiar with the concept of hiding affiliate links, here’s a quick overview:
Affiliate links typically look something like this:
http://www.salessite.com/cgi-bin/affiliates/refer.cgi?r=3572&p=17
Or this:
http://www.affililserver.com/affiliatenet/link.php?ref=1452&prodid=22
These links look “techie” and quite obviously affiliate links.
With Affiliate Fire Extinguisher, your links look like this:
http://www.mysite.com/info/ebook.php
Or this:
http://www.mysite.com/recommended/
These links are neat, clean, and look just like links to pages on your own website.
In an independently conducted test where the exact same email was sent to two groups of 4000 people – with the only difference in the emails being the link – over eight times as many people clicked on the cloaked link as clicked on the original affiliate link.
That’s over eight times as much money, without any extra effort!
Cloak And Brand Your Affiliate Link SAFELY
If you’re not familiar with the concept of link cloaking and branding, here’s a quick overview:
The simplest solution for hiding/securing an affiliate link is called a “Simple Redirect”. It makes the link look like a web address on your own site, but as soon as the visitor clicks on the link, they are “redirected” to the sales page, which is shown as normal.
Example: Someone clicking on our “hidden” link:
http://www.mysite.com/info/ebook.php
would see the sales page in their browser as normal. In the web address bar on their browser, they may see something like this:
http://www.salessite.com/ebooks/?ref=1234
The drawback is that it’s obvious to the visitor that we used an affiliate link to access the page. It is not obvious to people before they clicked on the link, but it is obvious afterward. This may in some cases put visitors off buying the product.
Link Cloaking is a more advanced link hiding method. It also makes the link look like a web address on your own site, but when the visitor clicks on the link, the address of your website is still shown in the web address of the browser, even when the sales page is being shown.
Example: Someone clicking on our “hidden” link:
http://www.mysite.com/info/ebook.php
would see the sales page in their browser as normal, but in the web address of their browser, they would still see:
http://www.mysite.com/info/ebook.php
As you can see, this offers significant benefits over the simple link hiding solution.
Link Branding is a variant on Link Cloaking. It works in exactly the same way, except that in addition to showing the sale page being promoted, a small message is shown at the top or bottom of the visitor’s web browser. This is usually in the form of a single line strip containing some form of an advertising message from the affiliate with a clickable link.
The method has all the advantages of Link Cloaking, but with the extra feature that this special message from the affiliate is shown at the same time as the sales page.
This allows you to advertise another offer, advertise a bonus for ordering through your affiliate link, or just provide a link back to your own website in case the visitor is not interested in buying the offer.
