Savvy Affiliate

Day 30 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide

Cloaking your affiliate ads can help drive up your clickthroughs. 

One thing that you will have to decide when you start advertising on your site is how obvious do you want to make your ads.  Clearly if you are using AdSense, you will be forced to show the “Ads By Google”   If you are putting a bunch of sponsored links in your nav bar, you should probably mention that they are sponsored.  But there are other gray areas where you might want to keep your affiliate ties a little more hidden.

People are less likely to follow a link if they know it is an affiliate program

It is sad but true.  As soon as a visitor sees that the webmaster is making money off of him, he is less likely to follow any links, or buy any items.  It is not that the visitors dislikes the webmaster, but putting up affiliate ads means that there is an extra level to the relationship.  It the blogger advertising because they love the product?  Or love the money?

While many ads you should be explicit about your relationship, there are some times when it is not wrong to hide it a little more.  For instance if you are recommending a book on Amazon.com you may also include an affiliate link.  You genuinely like the book, so why not take advantage of the content that you wrote and try to monetize it some?   Is it wrong to hide your affiliate status in this case?  I would argue that it isn’t.

So how do you cloak affiliate ads?

The single biggest way that people get turned off on affiliate ads is when they mouse over and see a big long string of alphanumerics in the link.  Clearly that is being tracked to someone.  Once they see that string, the chances of clicking the link drop in half. So the trick is to not let the string alphanumeric string appear in the window.  People can still see the real destination by right clicking properties, but they are less likely to do that.

To make a desired url appear in the window use the html “onmouseover” and “onmouseout” in the <a> tag.   If I was linking into startlogic, I might use the two lines you see below

onmouseover=”window.status=’http://www.startlogic.com’;return true;” onmouseout=”window.status=’ ‘;return true;”

How that would look in the whole ad is something like

<a href=”http://www.jdoqocy.com/click-2453369-10394256″ target=”_top” onmouseover=”window.status=’http://www.startlogic.com’;return true;” onmouseout=”window.status=’ ‘;return true;”>IxWebHosting </a> 2 free domain registrations & only $3.95/month

The link still directs to the same place, but now it is less obvious that it is an affiliate link.  It is much more inviting for clicks, and will likely result in more income.

Don’t misuse the cloaking

Please don’t be a spammer with this.  Don’t tell people you are directing them to EBay and then really send them to some mal-ware site.  As with anything there is potential for abuse, but if you use it correctly there is nothing wrong with it.