If you’ve been doing affiliate marketing for some time, I’m sure you have come across terms like affiliate link cloaking, stealth cloaker, ninja cloaker, and other equally fancy names.

What exactly are these and are they really important for affiliate marketing? In my opinion, the answer is a big “YES!”

If you are not using any kind of cloaking for your affiliate links, I’m afraid you could be a victim of affiliate commission theft, up to more than 30% of your earned commissions! Shocking, isn’t it?

Here are the top 4 benefits why you should and must use some kind of affiliate link cloaking technology:

  • Make your links look nice and professional. Your link will be a page or folder extension off your domain name instead of a long ugly link with lots of symbols and numbers. It’s proven that customers are turned off by ugly links.
  • Reduce commission hijacking. Prevent customers from deleting your ID at the end of an obvious affiliate link and adding their own IDs. Some customers even chop off all your affiliate tracking code and go to the merchant main page.
  • Manage and track all your links from one admin area. You can easily see which campaign is doing well and how many clicks each link is getting.
  • Able to update your affiliate link url anytime and only once even if you have hundreds of links out there. This is a useful feature in the event your merchant changes the link format or worse, goes out of business and you need to change over to a different merchant.

There are many affiliate link cloaker systems out there. Most of their basic features are the same but some have some extra features that are nice to have.

I have researched many of them and this is my personal recommendation:

Samurai Stealth Cloaker
Installs on your hosting server so you can access the admin area from any internet connection. You can easily transfer all your links to another website if needed. Also comes with an article cloaking script for use with article directories.