Anyone who’s dabbled in the world of affiliate marketing knows that protecting your information online is extremely important.  When it comes to driving traffic to your affiliate offers, link cloaking is one of the most underestimated requirements for ensuring your affiliate income is not compromised.  This is probably most vital when promoting eBooks, software and membership programs on Clickbank.

A lot of people make 6 figure incomes strictly off of utilizing pay per click advertising methods to drive traffic to the vendor-supplied or home made landing pages.  One issue that’s always been at the forefront of the Clickbank community is link cloaking. 

Previously, Clickbank generated horrendous links with all sorts of ugly characters which aren’t SEO friendly or encouraging to the potential buyer.  Though they have implemented a built in link cloaking tool, many hackers and dark side marketers are still able to hijack your Clickbank affiliate links, input their user ID and steal your profits.

With the advent of social networking and real time micro-blogging sites like Twitter, url shortening services are becoming quite popular among the affiliate marketing industry.  After all, 99% of them are absolutely free with zero strings attached!  The top 3 url shortener services available are provided by Doiop, TinyURL and ReadThisUrl.  Url shortening services are effective and reliable – with the only true issue being complete control over the appearance and tracking of your affiliate links.

While using a simple chunk of html can easily accomplish the same end result, there is really no point to figuring it out if you have never done it before.  Equally enough, if you want to cloak and protect your Clickbank links, there are also several paid services available, which if you can afford, will present you with the most options.  Sometimes your tools can make or break your business, so remember to streamline your efforts and become a well oiled Clickbank profit machine!