What Does Your Link Say About You?
In the past few months, I have talked about how you should always try to hide your affiliate links. There is no shame in having affiliate links on your site, but leaving your links on your page can turn a few people off, and it that’s not bad, you can give a lot of information about what you are promoting and who you are working with by leaving your affiliate links uncloaked.
Let’s say you are working with Commission Junction. You probably work with a bunch of merchants and display their products on your blog or site. Here is how your signature link will look like (uncloaked):
Obviously, you can tell that I haven’t shown you the whole thing (I had to hide my own affiliate ID). Now, when I come to your site and see your affiliate link exposed like that, I immediately think of four things:
- You don’t know what you are doing and are hoping to make a few bucks without doing your homework
- You want me to promote the product you are promoting too.
- You want me to be able to search the web to find out what you have been doing.
- You just don’t care.
None of the above items are really a positive for you. And let’s not forget that a lot of folks avoid clicking on links that look suspicious, and that thing up there darn sure looks suspicious. Cloaking affiliate links is not very hard, so why leave anything to chance?
