Guess what, there’s a plugin for that too. Sorry had to. Yes WordPress is an affiliate webmasters dream come true due to all the support it has received throughout the community. Not only can you cloak your affiliate links for free, you can also track them as well, all from within your dashboard. This plugin doesn’t come with any frames (unless you want it to) displaying that you’re using something for free either, like a few other sites that will remain nameless.
Pretty Link
Pretty Link is the name of the plugin created by Blair Williams. Very quickly to install this from your dashboard, click on your “Plugins” tab, click “Add New,” type in “Pretty Link” in your search bar, click “Install” once you’ve found the one by Blair Williams, then activate. You’ll have a new tab at the bottom of your dashboard to use your new plugin.
Settings explained for affiliates
If you really want to you can set up different groups depending on which project you’re working on. Let’s say for example you promote online poker sites, poker software, and poker clickbank products. That’s three groups right there for the organized types. Simply click on “groups” then “Add a pretty link group” type in your information and hit create.
To create a new cloaked link click “Add Link” type in the url you want to cloak, give it a new pretty link (yoururl.com/name you want for your link… example yoururl.com/fulltilt) title it (from the example it would be full title poker) give it a description if you want then click on “Link Options.”
Under redirection types you have a few different options. If you want a truly cloaked link select cloaked. Change parameters to “Standard Parameter Forwarding” if you want to get credit for your sale and click create.
If you’re interested in simply tracking a page you can select “pixel.” This will create one of those 1 x 1 pixel images that many websites including paypal use to track pages. There are question marks you can click on for help with the plugin in case you get lost.
Tracking
You don’t know what you don’t track. Perhaps you are promoting a program that isn’t converting very well as your primary affiliate program yet your secondary affiliate program is converting like hotcakes. You can track your clicks through your Pretty Link dashboard. Not only will you see how many times someone has visited the link, you’ll also see how many times unique visitors went to said link. In other words you can tell if you have repeat visitors going to a site versus new ones.
Based off the information collected on click thrus you can log into your affiliate program website to see how many sales have been generated. If you’re sending 200 visitors to generate 1 sale for one product yet only 50 visitors to generate 2 sales of another product you now know you should at least switch the order of your affiliate programs.
Link Jacking
To me this is an old wives tale created to sell cloaking software. Yes, most cloaking software sells at prices anywhere from $7 to $197. Some are designed specifically to send visitors back to the webmaster’s site as a favor for cloaking your links (and yes Pretty Link does have an option for you to do this if you’re so inclined.) While it is true that a few people will try to get around you earning a commission, most people surfing the internet are far too lazy (or don’t even know) how to get around you earning a commission. Before December of 2009 US webmasters didn’t even have to alert the general public that the product they were promoting was an affiliate program!
So why cloak?
There are two reasons to really cloak a link. Bruce mentioned one in his recent comment “it looks more professional.” This is especially true in an e-mail, as people don’t really want to see a hop.yourid.product.clickbank.com url nor do they want to click on it. Yet yoursite.com/coolproduct looks much better and appealing to your reader. The second reason is to track. If you’re trying to make money on the internet (or already make money on the internet and want to make more) you have to track your results. There is no way around this. The more you track, the more you can optimize. The more you optimize, the more profit you’ll be putting into your pocket.
Jason Narog is the creator of the royal flush of spades poker card guards and is currently installing Pretty Link onto all his WordPress websites.
