How to Cloak & Shorten Affiliate Links (Maximize Commissions)

What would 30 percent more clicks on your affiliate links do to your bottom line?

By cloaking your affiliate links, you can achieve just that!

Today I want to share the five main reasons why I believe every single affiliate marketer needs to be sharing cloaked affiliate links with their audience.

Afterwards, I'll jump into a tutorial on how you can generate a cloaked affiliate link for yourself.

Reason #1 Boosted Click Through Rates

The first benefit of cloaking your affiliate links is that now you have full control over the domain and the back half of your affiliate link.

By default, if you were to just grab a raw affiliate link from one of the main affiliate networks, such as Amazon Associates or Mavely, it's going to come in a format like:

- amzn.to

- mavely.app.link

Followed by a random sequence of letters and numbers.

While this may make sense to you as an affiliate marketer, I can guarantee that to your audience this is going to be  intimidating as they have no idea where this affiliate link is headed.

To get around that, use a link management tool to cloak your affiliate link.

By doing this, you can customize the domain to be your own domain name or something relevant to your brand.

On top of that, you get to customize the back half of the URL to have descriptive text.

Bit.ly a leading link management tool and affiliate link cloaking option conducted a study on their clients and found that by shortening or cloaking their links, they received 34% more clicks on them for many of you.

In theory, this is a striaght 34% increase in the amount of affiliate income that you earn.

‍Reason #2 - Access to Analytics

The second benefit to cloaking your affiliate links is that you are now going to gain insights into your marketing efforts through analytics.

All of the major link management tools are going to allow you to see the number of clicks that pass through your totality of your links, as well as down to a single links level.

Many link management tools show you the geographical locations of where all of your audience is clicking through as well.

Most of them will give you access to referer data, which is super important in that event that you're promoting a single affiliate link in multiple places such as Pinterest, YouTube, and your blog.

By taking advantage of a link management tool You can view a graph and look at the numbers of what percent of your audience is coming through your affiliate link from each marketing channel.

Reason #3 - Mobile Deep Linking

Third reason why I believe every affiliate marketer needs to be cloaking their affiliate links is that most affiliate link cloaking providers come with a feature known as mobile deep linking. I've got two gif to show here that I've demonstrated with screen recordings using Instagram on my phone.

The first is going to be an affiliate marketer that did not take advantage of a mobile deep link.

As you can see, when the consumer clicked on the Instagram story to purchase the item, they're taken to an Instagram. In app browser where they are not signed in adding many extra steps to the purchasing process.

This is going to drastically reduce the amount of conversions that this marketer receives.

Compare this to the video on the right where the marketer used a mobile deep link, the consumer clicks the link, they're prompted to open the Amazon application.

And as we can see, we are already signed in here and able to purchase in just one click by taking advantage of mobile deep links. You're going to massively increase your the conversion rate of the traffic that you are sending to applications like Amazon.

Reason #4 - Edit Links Globally

The fourth reason why every single affiliate marketer should be cloaking their affiliate links is it allows them to act as global variables.

These variables allow you to change the end destination of the cloaked link inside of your marketing software rather than changing every single destination scattered across your content.

Let's say that I'm promoting a scuba diving masks on my blog and on my YouTube channel. If for whatever reason I wanted to change where all of these affiliate links pointed, if I was not using a link cloaking solution, I would then have to go and manually edit every single location where this link existed.

By using a link management tool or cloaking your affiliate links, you can go inside the marketing software that you are using and simply swap out this end destination, whenever you want.

Whether you're trying to promote a product that's on Amazon, but now you want to go to the D2C store, whatever the reason might be, you can now globally edit all of your affiliate links by using a link management tool.

Reason #5 - Simpler Links

The final reason every affiliate marketer needs to take advantage of cloaked affiliate links is that it's going to make your affiliate links more readable, speakable, and therefore typable.

Let's dive into what I mean by this.

Here we have an example of an Instagrammer who is trying to direct traffic off of the Instagram application by typing out her liketoknowit link inside of the description of her instagram post.

Instagram and tiktok are notorious for making it very difficult for traffic to leave the platform.

I applaud Sarah for trying to do this, however, I can promise you that nobody is going to type in this link manually, especially when it's for written like that. Instagram won't let you even copy and paste.

What she should have done here is use a link cloaking tool, like Geniuslink, and that way she can condense the link, making it extremely memorable and typable.

She could do geni.us/fort-cottage.

Or she could use a custom domain, her website Simply Sarah, and do simplysarah/fort-cottage.

That way, anyone that sees that written raw in the Instagram description could memorize it and type it into their browser, maximizing the amount of traffic that Sarah sends from the Instagram post to her Like to Know It page.

How you can cloak an affiliate link for Yourself

For the purposes of this tutorial, I'm going to be using Geniuslink to do this.

However, there are many options out there that can all work for this, and I'll link them all here.

However, if you are an Amazon affiliate marketer, Geniuslink is likely going to be the best option for you.

Geniuslink Home Page

From the home page of my Geniuslink account, I'm going to click "New" and then simple link.

Next, I'm prompted to input the final destination where I want my cloaked affiliate link to head.

For this example, I'm going to generate an affiliate link to this scuba diving computer.

From Amazon, I navigate to the product page and click get link and do short link.

We'll then paste it inside of Geniuslink.

We're going to need to add some descriptive text for the back half of the cloaked URL.

After that, our cloaked link is ready to go.