by Rahimah Sultan

 

Affiliate Marketing is a branch of Internet marketing where the advertisement publisher gets paid for every customer or sale provided by him. Affiliate marketing is the basis for all other Internet marketing strategies.

 

Originally, affiliate marketing involved lots of spamming, false advertising, trademark infringement, etc. Since the invention of complex algorithms and advanced security, it’s safer to do business and shopping online. This even led to …  More

 
 
 
 

by Rahimah Sultan

 

What is Affiliate Link URL Masking?

 

If you are an affiliate marketer you have links that look like the following examples.
1) http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Wireless-Reading-Display-Globa lly/dp/B003FSUDM4/ref=amb_link_353259562_2?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIK X0DER&pf_rd_s=center-10&pf_rd_r=11EYKTN682A79T370AM3&pf_rd_ …

2) http://secure.hostgator.com/~affiliat/cgi-bin/affiliates/clickthru.cgi?id=bcdefg

3) http://www.safelisttactics.com/?rid=118???

 

These links could and should be masked with shortened links like the following.

 

1) http://tinyurl.com/Kindle

2) http://tinyurl.com/6u9d26e

3) http://tinyurl.com/safelists-mktgg

 

Although there are numerous programs available, these are examples using tinyurl.com

 

Reasons for Link Masking

 

As with the first two examples above, sometimes your domain is too long and complicated to spell and/or write. Or you may be using free hosting that does not give you a dedicated domain but just a subdirectory of their domain. Using a shorter, more understandable and eye pleasing link will add a big boost to your online marketing.

 

Another big reason to mask affiliate links is to keep people from stealing your money. Anyone who is actively promoting other people’s products and/or services as an affiliate could be losing money from hard earned commissions because of those UGLY long affiliate URLs that target you as an affiliate, and scare away your visitors and/or potential customers.

 

Affiliate link masking sounds pretty obvious. All you’re doing is replacing that UGLY long affiliate URL with a nice cloaked (forwarded inside an invisible frame), professional domain name like the short ones listed in the above examples, that remain sticky.

 

Sticky simply means that the URL remains the domain name you chose, once your visitor has clicked on it, and it doesn’t redirect back to the UGLY long affiliate URL you started with. This makes you, the affiliate, look professional in the eyes of your visitors and/or potential customers. They don’t know if you are an affiliate or the actual web site owner. A web site’s stickiness is important to online advertisers because the longer visitors stay on the site the more exposure they have to potential advertising.

 

And lastly, people just don’t like to click on strange looking long links.

 

How does URL Masking work?

 

In case of URL Masking the Domain Forwarding server sends the client a Frames page where the Frame Source contains the destination URL you have specified. This ensures that the URL in the address bar of the browser does not change when the client sees the destination page.

 

As Web surfers become more knowledgeable of how affiliate programs work, more people will omit your affiliate ID or use someone else’s ID when ordering. Either way, you may lose commissions you’re supposed to get. Using full window frame page is probably the most effective (though not perfect) way to prevent such loss. In fact, practically all affiliate link cloaking software uses this method. The address bar won’t display your affiliate URL unless the affiliate site has a frame breaker (e.g.: Gmail). If visitors book mark the site, they will come back to your frame page. This means they use YOUR affiliate ID every time, and this could translate into sales.

 

Although masking your URL address can be very effective for marketing, in some cases it’s not necessary and disturbs the normal navigation of the user. So be sure to use URL masking only when it’s really necessary, and help convert more of your visitors into SALES!

 

There are many services online that offer this. Simply go to Google and do a search.

 

If you are a serious Affiliate Marketer and/or are just starting out online with affiliate programs then this is something you’ll definitely want to look into. Not only will you look professional in the eyes of your visitors and/or potential customers you’ll also be safe guarding your hard earned affiliate commissions with affiliate link URL masking. When visitors come to your site, the link is their first impression, and first impressions matter, especially when doing business online.

 
 

by Rahimah Sultan

Affiliate Marketing is a branch of Internet marketing where the advertisement publisher gets paid for every customer or sale provided by him.


Affiliate marketing is the basis for all other Internet marketing strategies.

In affiliate marketing, affiliate management companies, in-house affiliate managers and third party vendors are effectively utilized for E-mail Marketing and Search Engine Marketing for the success of the product.


Web traffic can be traced with the help of a third party or owners of the affiliate programs.


Originally, affiliate marketing involved lots of spamming, false advertising, trademark infringement, etc.


Since the invention of complex algorithms and advanced security, it’s safer to do business and shopping online. This even led to better scrutinizing of terms and conditions by the merchants.


As affiliate marketing opened up more opportunities, it also increased marketing competition.

Due to this pressure in-house affiliate programs for merchants were replaced by out-sourced programs. The companies that offer this service have expert affiliate marketing and network program managers who have various affiliate program management techniques.


These affiliate networks have publishers associated with them who help with the advertising.

Affiliate marketing was started by cdnow.com who had music oriented websites. They placed a list of music albums on their site and paid others to put those links in their websites when a visitor bought an album through their site. The first company to link with cdnow.com was Geffen Records.

Two months later, a woman proposed an offer to Amazon to sell their books on her website for a certain percentage. They liked the idea and started the Amazon Associates Program. It was more of a commission program where they received a commission if a visitor clicked their links and banners on other’s sites and bought something.


Since its inception, the affiliate network has been adopted by various businesses like travel, education, telecom, mobile, gaming, personal finance, retail, and subscription sites.

The compensation methods used are Cost per sale (CPS), Cost per action (CPA), Cost per mile (CPM) and Cost per click (CPC).


The first two are the main methods used today. This is because in CPM and CPC, the visitor that turns up on a particular website might not be the targeted audience and a click would be enough to generate a commission.


CPS and CPA require that the visitor not only click on the link but also buy something or sign up for some service, which proves that the visitor is in a targeted audience. Only then does the affiliate get paid.


So the affiliate should try to send as much targeted traffic as possible to the advertiser to increase his/her returns. For this reason, affiliate marketing is also known as performance marketing. It totally depends upon the performance of the affiliate.

The affiliate team can be differentiated from a sales team by the nature of their jobs. The job of the affiliate team is to get targeted traffic to a point, then the sales team must influence the visitor to buy the product or service.

This is a very effective method because the money is being paid only when results have been achieved. The publisher incurs all the cost except that of initial setup and development of the program, which is incurred by the merchant.


Many businesses credit affiliate marketing for their success.

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