If you are one of those affiliate marketers or a blogger. You probably would have used affiliate links in your websites, blog posts, or campaigns.
And you should have also heard about the term link cloaking a lot. But if you are not quite sure about the term, in this article you will learn in detail about what link cloaking is, the benefits of link cloaking, and the best free wordpress plugins for link cloaking.
Table of Contents
What is Link Cloaking?
Link Cloaking is changing a long ugly looking link to a simple link with your brand/website name attached.
The structure of these affiliate links follows a generic pattern. The pattern mostly goes like Website url+ ref + your name/id.
The problem with these links is their length and structure. At the very first sight, these affiliate links look quite fishy and are not very trustworthy.
Many of your website visitors might refrain from clicking these links. With the increase in the number of Internet scams and phishing these days, people try to be aware and are usually very wary of clicking any links that look malicious or not so trustworthy.
This can be a problem if you are into affiliate marketing seriously. Link cloaking is a technique that comes to the rescue. With this technique, you can easily transform your affiliate links into nice-looking, trustworthy recommendation links with your website’s brand name and URL attached. This makes visitors who click those links feel safe.
Benefits of Link Cloaking
a) Statistics – If you use any link cloaking tool to cloak your links, it becomes easy to collect analytics about the number of people who have clicked on the links, their demographics, and other information. This will help you to choose the right products for your audience.
b) Improves the Click Through Rate – Nobody wants to click on a random link with lots of numbers and characters. This makes the look so suspicious. But by clocking your link, you make it look so professional and this will increase the overall CTR.
c) Redirection based on Geolocation – In link cloaking tools, you can set conditional redirections based on the user’s geographical location. If a user from Canada clicks on an amazon affiliate link, you can redirect him to the Canadian version of the site using the link cloaking tool.
d) Make links look pretty – Link Cloaking makes your links look short and pretty.
e) Builds your brand’s authority – By using your brand’s name in affiliate links, you increase the reputation and authority of your brand.
f) Single-point link Updation – Outsmarts all the other benefits. If you need to update your affiliate link, you can update it at a single point.
g) Increases email delivery rates – Using Affiliate Links in the email usually lands your email in the spam folder, because google’s spam detection algorithm, categorizes affiliate links as spam. By Link Cloaking, you reduce the risk of your email being marked as spam.
h) Bypass Ad blockers – Ad blockers are good at blocking affiliate links. By Cloaking your links you can easily bypass ad blockers.
Best WordPress Plugins for Link Cloaking
Link cloaking requires tools to convert your affiliate links to trustworthy links. There are several free as well as paid tools that can help you cloak your links easily. The main difference between the paid and the free tool is the limit/ the maximum number of links you can convert in a day/month.
People try to avoid and not use affiliate links because they don’t feel very safe using them and it also makes your website’s reputation questionable.
Even if you genuinely recommend a good product or a service, a long affiliate link can make it look like a marketing strategy.
That is why it is important to cloak them.
Here I have listed the Top 4 Free Link Cloaking plugins that you can use for your affiliate links.
Easy Affiliate Links
Compatible with both the Classic and the Gutenberg WordPress editor. But the free version doesn’t offer you the statistics and information on how many people clicked your links.
For every affiliate link, you can add a name, description, categories, original affiliate URL, type of cloaking, the cloaked or shortened URL, anchor text, target, direction type, and no-follow.
This plugin makes it easy to manage all the affiliated links in a single place. You can have a better overview, and also edit the links if needed.
EasyAzon – Best Plugin For Amazon Affiliate Links
If you are an amazon associate member, then it is a tedious task to manage all the links. But with easyazon as the name states, it becomes completely easy to manage all the links in one place.
The plugin is free to download and there is no limitation on the number of sites you can use it on. Easy to set no-follow property, and target attribute.
Cloaks the affiliate links. The best part about this plugin is its ability to localize affiliate links. Based on the location of the visitor, easyazon automatically redirects them to the amazon site specific to their location. This increases the overall commission and purchase rate.
A quick view of the product pops up along with the product details, buy now, and pricing when a user hovers over the affiliate link cloaking with easyazon.
URL Shortify
It works for any links. This plugin shortens the links and makes them look simple, easy, and pretty. It comes with a free tracking feature that lets you track the audience who have actually interacted with the shortened URLs.
The special feature is unlike Bitly and other URL shorteners, which add their own domain name to the shortened URL. URL Shortify doesn’t add its own brand name to the shortened URLs. Instead, you can add your own domain name. This increases the overall brand reputation and trust.
It has a search feature, that makes it easy to search for any particular link from the heap of links. you can also append and forward the parameters from the original link to your cloaked link.
Easy-to-use dashboard, with analytical data. It also has a handy URL shortly widget that you can quickly make use of when processing lots of links.
ThirstyAffiliates – Best for creating banner ads
Ability to add Target (to open a link in a new tab), no-follow, and category slugs in the URL. A handy method to add affiliate links. Detailed statistics for tracking and reporting,
You can add images and banners to affiliate links which is a very unique feature. No other plugin in the list offers this feature for free. With this feature, you can easily create promotional banners and include your affiliate links in them.
If you don’t want a certain link not to be redirected, it can conditionally uncloak the links. Inbuilt proactive link fixes that detect outdated links and automatically fix them.
Wrap Up
Hope this article helped you understand link cloaking in detail, its benefits, and the best wordpress plugins you can use to cloak your links. Drop your thoughts and suggestions in the comments!
