If you're an internet marketer, then you have spent a great deal of time and sweat advertising Clickbank products through ppc advertising, link wheels, and other techniques to generate traffic to your site; hoping and praying that your visitors will click on the affiliate links to the products you're advertising. Yet, did you know that if you're not masking your affiliate urls that you could be losing 40-85% of your affiliate commissions? In this article, I'll explain the three ways you're giving away your commissions and the way you can protect your affiliate links in the future.

If you're linking straight to a product with your affiliate link, then your users will see that it is obviously an affiliate url. People enjoy buying online, but they do not like being sold to, and you'll quickly give up your commission when your visitor leaves your site or bypasses your un-cloaked link to browse directly to the product website.

You may also give away commissions as a result of link pirating. Other affiliate marketers might copy your affiliate hyperlink, then replacing their affiliate ID, buy the product; making a commission themselves. They could also copy your marketing efforts for the same product, drawing referrals away from your site.

If you market with ppc ads, then you may well lose ad exposure with an non-cloaked link. Search engines filter out redundant content, and unmasked affiliate link will look very similar to other marketers who are also not cloaking their links. By masking your link, your hyperlink will appear different, heading off the duplicate content filters.

To avoid wasting your efforts on affiliate marketing and giving away commissions, it's important to employ a link cloaking system when advertising affiliate products. Affiliate link cloaking is a method of masking or redirecting a hyperlink to a website so that the "pretty" link looks like it sits on your website. When a user cliks the link, they will get sent to the vendor's website, passing your affiliate ID so you can get the referral on a purchase. As you can see, url masking is an effective - and legitimate way to protect your affiliate referrals and stop link theft.

The best link cloaking tools will offer a marketer multiple options and techniques for cloaking links, such as meta tag redirection, php redirects and iframe cloaking. The goal of an link cloaking program should be to protect your affiliate links as much as possible. Some link cloakers still use outdated methods that leave your affilaite links revealed. Most importantly, a good URL cloaking tool must be simple to use and offer solid results for all your affiliate links.

Far And Away, the best link cloaker available is the Ultimate Affiliate Link Cloaker. This new, feature rich tool offers internet marketers four unique link masking methods, the option to encode your affiliate link, a sales page bypass tool for clickbank products, and the ability to produce copy and paste code for dropping affiliate cookies. The Ultimate Affiliate Link Cloaker is simple enough that even the newest affiliate marketers can create cloaked links in moments, or get easy to use directions via pop-up tool tips. The Ultimate Affiliate Link Cloaker is perfect for marketers at all stages because it's web based, and most significantly, it's free to use.

Whatever technique of affiliate link cloaking you choose to utilize, it will be well worth your time and effort to use the Ultimate Affiliate Link Cloaker to properly cloak a link so you will be sure to get 100% credit for all the sales you make.