Free WordPress Link Cloaking
If you’re thinking of monetizing your blog by using affiliate programs, link cloaking is something that you probably won’t think of instantly. After a while, you’ll realize that your visitors can avoid your affiliate link, or replace it with their own, very easily, thereby robbing you of those much-needed bucks, and this is not a good thing.
Cloaking your links won’t completely eliminate this problem, but it will keep your visitors from immediately realizing you’re sending them off to a Clickbank (or other affiliate marketplace) link.
For most sites, I’m a big fan of GoTryThis. It serves me very well as a link cloaker, with the added benefit of embedding cookies, great stats, split testing, and other neat tricks.
However, for WordPress sites that will either be flipped, or that I want to keep separate from my main sites, the free Link Cloaking Plugin is a brilliant choice.
I’ve just finished installing it on some WordPress 2.7 sites, and it’s fully compatible with that version of the CMS.
Once you’ve installed it in the plugins directory and activated it, you can head to the Settings menu in your WordPress admin to set the overall configuration.
You’ll have the opportunity to choose whether you want to cloak all your links, or just ones that you tag with a special tag. Whether you want links cloaked in pages, posts, or both. You can choose to use the nofollow tag on cloaked links, and if you want all links except links to your own websites to be cloaked and nofollowed, add all your own domains to the exceptions list.
You can also choose your own prefix to your cloaked links. I have noticed a lot of marketers use /recommends/, but I’ve had good results with things like /special/ , /discount/ and /sale/ for more obvious product links.
If you don’t want global link checking, but just want to cloak specific links all around your site, or if you want to add banners to your template that are also cloaked, the Link Cloaking plugin can help with this too.
In the Tools menu, you can select the Cloaked Links item to add static cloaked links.
The plugin will give you a list of each url you enter, and you can use your new cloaked link everywhere… in your template, in your emails, in forum signatures, or anywhere else you’d like to promote that particular link.
A great free alternative to the many commercial plugins out there. Click here to give it a try.
December 30th, 2008 at 10:58 am
Just a quick note to say thanks to everyone who’s contributed to this blog. The tips I’ve learned have saved me a lot of wasted time. Keep up the good work! moneyonline
January 2nd, 2009 at 6:05 am
Great help, thanks.
January 7th, 2009 at 11:08 pm
Do Link Cloaking gives rating? I never tried it yet. But Dot it helps in ranking?
January 12th, 2009 at 9:46 pm
In what way does cloaking can help.
January 19th, 2009 at 9:43 pm
Nice tip on what seems like an extremely useful plugin – can’t wait to test it out!
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August 24th, 2009 at 10:42 am
Great affiliate WordPress plugin, I will conside to buy one.
April 27th, 2010 at 6:56 pm
As a newbie on this subject I am always looking for info like this that can help me. Thanks for the info, I will check back again later
May 18th, 2010 at 9:04 pm
There are lots of Affiliate programs out there like Amazon, Clickbank, etc. Just sign up with them and see what works for you.~’:
May 24th, 2010 at 5:18 am
Happiness is a state of mind that really depends how we see the situations in our lives each day. you can have all the riches in the world but still see it as a lonely place.”:”
August 22nd, 2010 at 3:33 pm
affiliate programs pay much better than adsense but they do not pay per click`;,
December 4th, 2010 at 4:19 am
i would always sign up on affiliate programs on the internet to earn extra money for my home `’.
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Daniel
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