bit.ly - the plus side is you get tracking so you can analyse where your traffic is coming from; the minus side is that on many affiliate sales pages the bit.ly link simply reverts to your affiliate URL.
I know a top affiliate internet marketer who says he ran a test to see if having your affiliate link showing in the browser makes a difference: he wanted to test if people rejected your affiliate name or number, and his test concluded that less than 1% of sales were lost against a true link cloaking example. But for me, I want everything to be 100% professional so I sleep well at night!
I don't worry about losing sales: I worry about looking average. I want to ba above average when it comes to managing my affiliate business - if true link cloaking exists then I want to discover it and use it, even though I expect to have to pay for the service.
Well, bit.ly is free but isn't 100% effective so I looked elsewhere. I found Richard Legg's MyLinkGuard which not only cloaks your link as www.yourdomain.com/recommends/product (you can change recommends for go or likes or anything you want since the link is stored as a page in your website file manager, and product can be any word you want) but also displays a bar at the top of the page - when someone clicks on the bar and buys the product you get 50% commission! Good and bad. I don't like distractions: I want visitor to stay on my page.
My main two problem with MyLinkGuard are:-
1. you have two tiny videos to watch to show how to set up the link guard: no matter how often I watch them, I can never remember the sequence for setting up the files in my cPanel and at least once I have put the whole "recommends" folder in the wrong place and needed a lot of help from my webhost team. Too techie for me: I am busy and I need something quick and simple I am not going to mess up!
2. I find because the pages are now in my file manager that everything loads way too slowly. I don't like that at all so although this was the best link cloaker I had found I still wanted something more! I want to find a different product that is easy to use and truly cloaks my link and doesn't let me mess up and no techie stuff to remember or keep learning.
So! What else is out there? PrettyLinkPro by Blair Williams will integrate with your WordPress admin - how neat is that! It includes tracking and free lifetime updates. It does everything you want and can be organized within your WP admin. It's cheap! So I'm going with this!
Here's the link: have a look for yourself!
Pretty Link Pro Landing PageWishing you every success with your online business! Adwello
