A Way Around the Affiliate Link

An affiliate link is one way of earning money online. Affiliate link is part of affiliate marketing, where a website is used to redirect visitors to the partner website. The partner website then compensates the affiliate site for sending the visitor. The deal for compensation varies-some are paid for every click or visitor brought to the partner, others (and this is the most common today) are paid for every sell made by the visitor brought by a particular affiliate. In essence, this is a very powerful strategy. With several affiliates online, the chances that visitors will get to the partner site is high (making a sale or successful transaction more likely). The partner site determines the source of the visitors through the affiliate link. This link is given to a particular affiliate and is used some sort of identification. It is essentially an ID, so to speak.

With this, the affiliate now holds the burden of sending visitors to the partner. This is already a change as it is; after all, one needs to use effective marketing skills to persuade a visitor to click that affiliate link-because the intension of visit that site is an intension to buy or get the service the affiliate is “selling.” What makes this task more difficult is the affiliate link itself.

Affiliate links are long and, as many describe it, unsightly and ugly. Because it is long and often has random characters (which collectively serves as the affiliate ID), it is not aesthetically appealing.

There are a number of reasons why this poses as a problem. For one, it is hard to market a link that is long and, simply put, not attractive. Post the affiliate link on an online forum, for instance, and it not appeal to readers compared to a site with a much shorted address. The ID also looks suspicious, as it contains some sort of malicious code-at least for online greenhorns.

But the problem poses a bigger problem if the Internet user is not an Internet beginner. Even those with the slightest knowledge of the Internet and its inner workings know what an affiliate link is and how it works. And people are naturally suspicious of it, both for valid and invalid reasons. People will know that the site is an affiliate, paid for attracting and persuading visitors to go to the partner’s site. The affiliate site immediately loses all its sincerity and credibility. It’s like someone promotes a product effectively, but when the interested party expresses interest, the promoter sends the person to another seller. It feels like deception.

One way to eliminate the limitations of affiliate links is through web forwarding and link cloaking. With web forwarding, the webmaster uses an alternative URL for the affiliate link. When a visitor clicks the link, he is sent to the partner site. Link cloaking takes it further by completely masking the URL of the affiliate link, so visitors will not know instantly that they are sent to a different site.

In itself, an affiliate link has limited potentials for attracting visitors, but certain tools such as link cloaking can compensate for this limitation.