So if you’ve been around affiliate marketing for very long then by now you have probably heard that you should cloak your affiliate links.

In case you have not heard this yet, let me explain why. If you already know why skip down to G-Lock link cloaker.

Basically you want to cloak your affiliate links so that no one can steal your commissions. Cloaking is a term used to describe hiding your links. If you have a link that is not cloaked, it might look something like this:

http://www.affiliatelink.com/ref?-kksa2erf

Or something like that anyway.

So if someone knows how to read your affiliate link, which any affiliate will, they can replace your portion of the link kksa2erf, with their affiliate link and steal what would have been your commission. There are also programs out there that will do this automatically.

Well, what I had been doing to hide my links was place them into a redirect script, save it as a .html file, then load it onto my server. I’m not going into everything with it here, but it was still possible to steal commissions from me, and from anyone else using this technique.

Until now! As soon as I found this tool I started switching my links over to this format. There are a few still on this site that I have not switched over as of the time I write this, but the switch will be completed very soon.

G-Lock Link Cloaker

G-Lock has a link cloaker that they introduced in the early part of 2008. I think this thing is pretty cool.

It has 3 fill in the blank fields where you tell it what you want to do. Here is a screen shot of it.

g-lock1

So all you do is take your assigned affiliate link for whatever product you are promoting into the first section titled Affiliate Link. Next you put in where you want the link to go to. This is great if you want to skip part of the site of the product owner.

Let’s say they have a squeeze page and you don’t want your customer having to go through the squeeze page to get to the sales page. You can get the link to the sales page yourself, then put it here and your customer will bypass the squeeze page. To learn more about why you might want to do that, G-Lock has a good explanation here.

Next is the field for the file name. The program is going to generate a .html file that you can load onto your server with your cloaked affiliate link. So the file name is whatever you want to call your .html file for that link. Once you fill that out, your done. Just click save to disk and it will work it’s magic. You will get a popup box asking you where you want to save your .html file.

What this program ultimately does is it encrypts your affiliate link. In the field under where it says Page Source you will see a bunch of numbers and letters. This is the encrypted link. So if anyone tries to steal your link URL so they can steal your commission, all they will see is a bunch of useless numbers.

The best part is, this tool is free. Check it out here.