The missing link between affiliate sales and your customer is the ‘LINK.’ In times of 2023, a user has to be extremely careful about what they click. There is uncertainty and risk involved, and no one wants to click on a suspicious link.
How will you prove to them that what you are telling them is for real benefit and just not another tactic of luring the customer into buying something without integrity? The answer lies in a process. Rome was not built in one day, and trust is definitely not gained easily. It takes to earn trust, and only producing valuable content over time regularly will lead to customer creation.
A good piece of writing will touch the customers only when it reaches the right audience. The search engine has its filters, and you really do not want to get knocked down as an advertisement. This leads us to the next purpose the link cloaking will do. It saves you from the eyes of Google for being typecast as affiliate marketing and ranking down the blog even after its good content.
No, it is not free. Yes, it will cost you, but this link cloaking tool is going to help you beat the market and form your own identity. That brings us to our next reason: a link cloaking tool helps you create links that can be easily memorized. This helps to popularise your brand at the tip of the tongue of users. It is always good to see a specific term/keyword in your URLs that identifies with you rather than random alphabets and digits.
Keeping track of affiliate records is a tremendous job; even though the dashboard takes care of it, your link cloaking tool is yet another opportunity to streamline everything in one place. It helps you form a chain and track your links for easy identification.
Link cloaking also supports maintaining your data privacy.
How does Link Cloacking Work?
Link cloaking works by redirecting a URL to another web page while hiding the actual destination of the URL.
Here Is How Link Cloaking Works:
1. When a visitor clicks on a cloaked link, they are redirected to an alternate location.
2. The cloaked link opens the destination page in an iFrame, which is a way of displaying one web page within another.
3. The URL shown in the address bar is that of the cloaking link and not the actual destination.
4. Link cloaking is often used for affiliate marketing to track commissions and hide the affiliate ID.
5. Cloaked links are also tracking links, which means that you can get comprehensive analytics on who clicked your link and when.
6. Link cloaking can be combined with a custom domain to create vanity URLs.
7. Cloaking can prevent robots from crawling through a link, which can cause a link to be marked as spam by automated systems.
Overall, link cloaking is a useful tool for affiliate marketers as it protects their commissions, improves their click-through rates, and enhances the user experience.
Click the link below for Link Cloaking software:
Software That Provide Link Cloaking Plugins:
With the growing number of website owners and affiliate sales, the need for link-cloaking tools is increasing. The market is coming up with improved tools that provide added features like link tracking, SEO, marketing tools, campaigning tools, analytical tools, and many more with their plans. Here are the top link cloaking software:
1. Thirsty Affiliates
Thirsty Affiliates is the best link cloaking software for a WordPress based website. It can turn long and complicated links into easy, trustworthy links. It also offers smart link uncloaking and import and export in CSV affiliates.
2. Pretty Links
Pretty links are great for automated link cloaking. It shortens the links, groups your links, and also replaces keywords for you. It is the best-automated plugin for link cloaking.
3. Genuislink
Geniuslink does not require a WordPress plugin but can be directly used for sponsored links on the web page. It also, to an extent, offers link shortening.
4. Lasso
Lasso lets you add permalinks to your affiliate links that are flexible for different websites. The dashboard consists of a complete list of all your affiliates in place.
The Best Link Cloaking Tool: Thirsty Affiliate
With thirsty affiliates, there is no second opinion; it is by far the best link cloaking tool I have tried. It is also very easy, user-friendly, and supports your business growth. The get thirsty affiliates, you need to go to your wordpress website dashboard, search for thirsty affiliates plugin, and install it. After activating the plugin, you need to fix the settings as per your personal preferences; it is advisable to choose a no-follow link setting. When you click on the thirsty affiliates tab on your dashboard, you enter the Plugin. Here, you need to name the affiliate in the add affiliate link, and below that is space for entering the URL of the destination website and, finally, click save. You are ready with a cloaked URL that can used as you like and as many times as you need. Any future change in affiliate URLs can be changed from a single link; there is no need to go separately and change it at every place you have used the affiliate link.
To visit the website click on the link: Thirsty Affiliates
Features Of Thirsty Affiliates:
Link Shortening/Cloaking
Link shortening is a part of link cloaking as it shortens the long URL into a more sophisticated and custom URL. This is the main purpose of Thirsty affiliates, and it works seamlessly.
Link Categorization
A user can categorize each link they cloak into different categories. This comes in handy when there are a large of links to manage with different types. So, categorization is a form of organization to view the statistics of links.
Redirect Type
Thirsty Affiliates gives the option to choose between enhanced JD redirect or Server-side redirect. Enhanced JD redirect is more secure, faster, and accurate as compared to traditional server-side redirects. However, server-side redirects are preferred by Google for crawling.
Affiliate Link Picker Tool
This is a classic thirsty affiliate feature where you can easily modify the links simply by clicking the link TA (i.e.thirsty Affiliate symbol). This link works like every other wordpress link on the website.
Advanced Link Insertion
This tool is for specific settings to add pre-wrapped images or shortcodes to the affiliate link. This feature is a part of the link picker tool.
Smart Uncloaking
Uncloaking is for affiliate programs that have strict terms of service. The links can be uncloaked to match the terms of specific affiliate programs like Amazon.
See Links on Website
This tool helps you identify the links that are attached and the links that still need to be worked on the pages or posts of the website. This enables quick analysis and completion of work.
Automatic Keyword Linking
With this tool, you can automatically link your keywords to affiliate links in all of your content. This is a time saver and brings down the redundant clerical efforts of adding links to keywords repetitively.
Advanced Statistics Report
This amazing WordPress plugin gives you a perfect statistical report so that you can check everything in one place. From link performance, category performance, geolocation performance, 24hrs performance, and best performer, the analysis is simplified and fast.
Geolocation Link Redirects
You can detect and redirect customers to specific destination URLs. It is an IP-based redirect to external links. Geolocation redirects are used to personalize the user experience, improve conversion rates, and enhance SEO localization efforts.
Apart from this, the features include automatic affiliate disclosure compliance, Amazon API Importing, CSV Import / Export Tool, Export Statistics Reports as CSV, Link Scheduling, High-Speed HTAccess Redirect, Link Event Notification Emails, Automatic 404 Checker, URL Shortening (with bit.ly & google), Control Plugin Visibility For Multi-Author Blogs, and WooCommerce External Product Integration.
Support
Thirsty affiliates extend a capacious knowledge base for every query, How-Tos, FAQs, getting started guides, Accounts, Pre-sales questions, and free and pro version questions. It is an excellent source to solve the issues quickly and answers everything step by step. Apart from this, they also offer direct support, to which they typically respond within 24-48 hours.
They are offering no-questions-asked money back; you sure need to give it a try to check whether it actually works for your business. There will be no transactional loss, and you get to learn a new thing. You get to try thirsty affiliates for 14 days and witness how it affects your affiliate sales.
To try the best link cloaking tool for WordPress click on the link below:
Frequently Asked Questions:
Q.1 What is the difference between basic, plus, and advanced plans?
All the plans offer the same features, the only difference being the number of websites that can be catered to as per plan value. For larger businesses that have multiple plans, the pricing is slightly higher.
Q.2 Is Thirsty affiliates only for affiliate marketers?
Thirsty Affiliates is specifically designed for affiliate marketers using WordPress. The plugin is not yet developed to support other web hosting platforms.
Q.3 Does Thirsty Affiliate offer a free trial?
No, the wordpress plugin does not offer any free trial on any of its plans, but it does have a 14-day, no-questions-asked refund policy. This gives serious buyers an opportunity to try the software and get their money back in case they are not happy with the services.
Q.4 Can I cloak an affiliate link?
With the Thirsty Affiliates wordpress plugin, you can definitely cloak all your affiliate links on a website. Link cloaking helps build customer trust and increase sales.
Q.5 Will my old links stop working if I stop using the software?
Failing to renew a License does not affect the links that are made during the licensed period. You will not be able to download the upgrades or create new links with an expired license.
Q.6 What are the alternatives to Thirsty affiliates?
There are a lot of link cloaking tools available in the market in a similar price range. The most popular tools are Geniuslink, Pretty Links, Lasso, URL Shortener plugin, and WooCommerce Cloak Affiliate Links.
Q.7 Is Thirsty Affiliates link cloaking compatible with Amazon?
Amazon disapproves of link cloaking as per its terms of service; hence, Thirst Affiliates has a smart uncloaking feature for Amazon affiliates.
Q.8 How to keep track of my links when they are cloaked?
The link cloaking tool manages all the data of your links in one place, and it is easily reportable. All the metrics and statistics are managed, and the clicks are registered on the thirsty affiliates dashboard.
Q.9 Is link cloaking useful for websites only?
Link cloaking is a tool that can be used for any form of digital marketing. These links can be attached to email marketing, blogs, advertisements, social media marketing, and so on.
Q.10 Can I modify the links after the link cloaking?
The links are customizable multiple times and can be replaced with fresh URLs. A change made in cloaked links is automatically reflected in all the links without any issues.