If you are promoting your affiliate URL on the web then you are in danger of losing sales to affiliate URL thieves. In fact over 40% of your affiliate commissions are in danger of being stolen. And the worst part of this is that is can be avoided with as little as 10 minutes of work and for free! All you need to do is cloak your affiliate URLs. By cloaking your affiliate URLs not only are you protecting your links and commissions you also increase your credibility and potential purchases.

As an affiliate you have probably received an affiliate URL to your program that looks something like this:

http://www.youraffiliatecompany.com/cgi-bin/w.cgi?67487

To the consumer this link does not look very appealing. Also, your affiliate code is right there in the open for someone to remove and place in their own affiliate number effectively stealing your sales. This is very possible with popular affiliate programs like SFI or ClickBank. But with cloaking you can turn that ugly URL into something more appealing like:

http://www.thenameofyourchoice.com/widgets

The benefits to this more appealing affiliate URL are:

1. Your affiliate id is now cloaked and your commissions are protected

2. This URL looks much more clickable to the consumer thus increasing your click through rates

3. If your customer decided to bookmark this site they bookmark your domain address and not the affiliate company address increasing your chances of a repeat visit.

4. With your own URL you are able to tack where you are getting visitors easier than with the generic affiliate link.

So how do you create this affiliate cloaking URL?

Here is what you do:

1. Connect to your web server using your FTP client (or other file management program)

2. Create a directory that properly describes the product you are affiliated with. In this example lets say your product is called "The Best ebook Ever" so I would create a directory called "best-ebook-ever".

3. Create a single index.html (or index.htm) file. If you don't have HTML Notebook will work.

4. Edit the index file so that it contains this exact code:

To make your page and the affiliate page look identical I suggest you copy the affiliate page's title to see this just click on your affiliate link and copy the phrase on the top of your browser's window.

Don't forget to double check your affiliate URL it MUST be correct!

5. Place the index.html file in your new directory ("best-ebook-ever" in my example).

That's all it takes. Now your affiliate link is cloaked and you gain credibility in your consumers mind by having a much more professional looking link.

Now that you know how to cloak your affiliate URL go spend 10 minutes and protect your commissions before you lose another sale to a affiliate URL thief.