Internet Marketing Toolbox

At the end of April, ClickBank announced a “new-look” site, AND a new feature called the “HopLink Shield”, a free tool that encrypts the affiliate and vendor nicknames in their HopLinks.

Instead of having
» affiliate.vendor.hop.clickbank.net
as your hoplink, you can now ALSO have an encrypted version which would look like this:
» a6af6wg3z2bjruenjfsb3v0o9l.hop.clickbank.net/

According to ClickBank,

“this adds an extra layer of privacy and anonymity to HopLinks, keeping affiliates’ promotional efforts and techniques hidden from others.”

According to me…

This means YOU have to be even more meticulous with your record keeping, otherwise you are going to have no friggin’ idea what vendor/product is associated with your links - and compounding one of the biggest problems facing affiliate marketers!

So what’s the point of all this cloaking of affiliate links?

Is is such a huge problem that you need to devote more of your energy and resources to dealing with it?

I’ll use ClickBank as an example… the very “obvious” link of
affiliate.vendor.hop.clickbank.net
does have its problems…

To those of us “in the know”, we know it is an affiliate link, and we know that you are trying to make money from it (shock! horror!)

But the the “average” Joe Blow - or Josephine Blow - out there in Internet land… they have NO real idea that it is an “affiliate” link… to them, it’s just a link!

HIDING it through some sort of cloaking tool, so your referral link now looks like
yourdomain.com/go/greatproductideahere
certainly makes it LOOK a lot better and more professional, and well worth doing in my opinion (see my post about a great plugin for Affiliate Management In WordPress)

But still, to anyone “in the know”, we also know what that means… so if we REALLY wanted to work out what product you are promoting as an affiliate, we still can!

And if we want to be “naughty” and change your afflink to our own so we can buy the product at a discount (and do you out of your commission) then it’s easily done…

But how much of a problem is that? Really?

Is that the reason why you are cloaking your affiliate links?

Or are you concerned about the more likely issue of commission theft by malware/spyware programs that are on your computer? Their sole purpose is to look for “standard” HopLinks and other affiliate links, and automatically change them so some other party gets the credit?

In other words… your site has to send your affiliate link to the visitors browser, where the malware/spyware program on their computer recognises the link and hijacks your code… and YOU miss out on the sale if they buy!

In which case, the ClickBank HopLink Shield will make a difference to that… until these buggers work out how to decode the url and include that in an update to their malware!

Or, are you concerned about people stealing your affiliate marketing ideas?

As we’ve already seen, ClickBank says their HopLink Shield is useful in hiding the promotional efforts and techniques used by successful affiliates.

And that’s a good thing!

Because I know if I’ve got a “system” that I’ve worked out… or paid a fortune to learn… then I don’t want some other wannabe Internet marketer coming along and “stealing” my ideas!

And that happens more than we are prepared to admit.

What are your thoughts on this?

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