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.

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I promised some results in my last post about Adsense Shield. I’ve been slow to write, not only because I’m on vacation, but because I’m not sure WHAT to report.

In case you haven’t read the last post, Adsense Shield is a script that is supposed to protect your Adsense site from clickbomb attacks… where someone clicks on your ads over and over in an attempt to get your Adsense account shut down. I set the script up on one of my sites to see if it affected overall Adsense earnings.

First of all, I haven’t noticed a drop in clicks, CTR, eCPM, or earnings for the site I added the code to. So, if it is working to protect my site from Adsense clickbombing, it’s not having a detrimental effect on revenue at all.

I do feel weird that it’s a piece of software I can’t really test once its installed, since doing so would mean I’d be clicking on my own ads. So, I’m trusting that the absence of error messages is a good sign and the script is working on my pages as well as it did on the test page.

Now that I’ve seen that it doesn’t decrease revenue, I’ll probably add it to my other sites when I’m back from vacation. I’m not at all sure how it’ll work on a Wordpress blog, but I’ll figure that out when I get to it.

I’ve been thinking, lately, about the possible ramifications of a rival or pissed off friend sabotaging my life by clickbombing Adsense links on my site.

It’s not that I regularly annoy my friends (I hope!), but there are certainly a few burned bridges in my past.

So, I was happy to find a solution when I Googled for possible solutions. I was even happier when I saw that AdSense Shield was free.

I’m going through the documentation now, and my understanding of the script is that it shows Adsense until the user clicks on one of them, after which the ads on your page are replaced by something other than Adsense — whether it be YPN ads or something you create yourself.

I’m going to install it on one of my sites tonight at 2am, when Google switches to the next day’s stats, and I’ll report on how and if it affects my earnings after a few days.

Today via, MindValleyLabs, I learned about Quantcast.com.

Quantcast is a new media measurement service that enables advertisers to view audience reports for millions of sites and services to build their brands with confidence. The free service empowers publishers to demonstrate the unique value of their audiences by tagging their websites, videos, widgets and games for direct measurement.

I plugged in the URL of my flagship site and was amazed at all the information about my audience that I could immediately glean from Quantcast’s reports.

I was actually shocked at how young my visitors are, and now that I know, I feel I can target ads and products toward them much more effectively.

I also saw that I have a high percentage of ‘drive by’ traffic compared to loyal visitors. Adding a blog or forum will, hopefully, alter that ratio.

Give it a try and see how your perceptions of your audience differs from Quantcast’s profile of your site. You might be surprised too.

One of the hottest sites to come out of the Web 2.0 phenomenon is Squidoo. If you are not building sites to Squidoo, you are missing one of the quickest and easiest ways to build free traffic for your website or blog.

Squidoo is a cross between a blog, a mini site, and a My Space page. Squidoo calls the sites “lenses” and the people who produce the sites are called “lensmasters.”

Squidoo lenses are very easy to make, even if you have not ever built a website or blog before. You can have a lens up and running in as little as 15 minutes.

Squidoo lenses are made up of “modules”. Squidoo has dozens of modules to choose from. There are modules for making lists. There are modules for You Tube videos. There are modules for Amazon and Ebay auctions. With a little knowledge of the module system, you can have your lens built in no time.

Squidoo also offers you a chance to make money from your lens. Squidoo makes its money from affiliate advertising with Google AdSense, Amazon, Ebay and several other sites. They keep track of the earnings of each module and split the profits with you 50-50. You can also donate your profits of your module to charity if you wish.

Squidoo is very lenient about allowing you to use third party advertising on your lens. You can promote your own website if you wish or promote your favorite affiliate product. Savvy network marketers often use Squidoo lenses to promote their products and recruit new reps.

Squidoo lenses often rank very high on Google, so it’s a great chance to build some backlinks to your primary site, or promote a variety of Clickbank links on a given topic.

Check out Tiffany Dow’s “Social Networking on Squidoo” for the best information on using Squidoo to capture leads and make sales in any niche with Squidoo.

Click here!