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WordPress Plugins : Cloaked Links

By Darren On January 6, 2009 Under WordPress Plugins

One of the easiest ways to earn money from a blog is by promoting affiliate products within your blog posts.  The problem is that they can look rather unsightly and will possibly confuse the readers with the long URL containing a string of random characters.

If you take a look at the URL’s below, which one is nicer to look at?

http://www.woothemes.com/amember/go.php?r=5159&i=b0

http://www.darrensingleton.com/loves/woo/

To be fair, the examples above don’t show how unsightly a URL can become – but they do illustrate how much nicer they can look.

I currently use the WordPress Link Cloaking Plugin from W-Shadow which is available for free.  As well as allowing you to cloak URL’s, it keeps track of the number of clicks each URL has received and you can also customize the text used to differentiate between site-wide links and your cloaked links.  Above, you can see I have used the word ‘loves’ but others choose to use the more obvious ‘goTo’ or even ‘more’.

As well as cloaking individual links manually, you can choose to automatically cloak certain links – all managed from the administration panel within WordPress.

If you are going to be promoting affiliate links, I’d highly recommend the Link Cloaking Plugin, you should see an increase in clicks straight away.

 

I have posted previously about WordPress plugins that I recommend.  You can read these posts by the links below:

WordPress Plugins : Akismet
WordPress Plugins : NoFollow Free
WordPress Plugins : Increase Sociability

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4 comments - add yours
Mikael

January 6, 2009

The point of cloaking links is not only to make the look nicer (which is actually the least important part) but an even more important point is that when you’re cloaking links your visitors will be more likely to click them.

Studies have shown that some people do not want to click on links that they know will make you money and some will even go as far as to just look at the link and copy it to the browser WITHOUT your affiliate ID.

Cloaking link is not something you do to cheat the visitor but to get what is rightfully yours.

Mikaels last blog post..How to Find Affordable Pet Insurance for Dogs

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Darren Reply:
January 6th, 2009 at 7:10 PM

@Mikael, the intention of the post wasn’t to suggest cheating the visitor – it was to tell people that by using cloaked links you are likely to intice more people to click the link and therefore increase your profits, than if you left the standard link in place

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Mikael

January 6, 2009

Darren I know but I just wanted to make sure that your other readers didn’t think so :) I use cloaking all the time and I’ll definitely look at this plugin as I had never heard of it.

Mikaels last blog post..How to Find Affordable Pet Insurance for Dogs

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NIck - Freelance Designer Sydney

June 12, 2009

that is awesome for those of us who occasionally post links to their cafepress or zazzle shop items and want something nicer in the post. I am definitely going to download it and give it a go. Nice find.

NIck – Freelance Designer Sydneys last blog post..Monitter – The easiest way to find new tweets

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