Internet Marketing: A Beginners Perspective

I continue learning more things, with my new journey into Internet Marketing.

AFFILIATE LINKS

It seemed obvious to me, when I started looking at my own affiliate links, that I was trying to promote something or other. Once again, I had to wonder why anyone would buy from me, when my affiliate links were practically shouting out to anyone who looked at them, that I was trying to sell something to somebody.

Then I discovered the many different sites that “cloak your links”. This protected me from the possibility that my future potential customers would bypass me. Seeing my obvious Affiliate Links, they might buy whatever I was promoting, directly from the parent company instead of buying it from me. If I didn’t cloak my links, it was possible that other devious internet users could replace my affiliate links with their own. There go my hard earned commissions that I hadn‘t even earned yet!

Here's one of the programs I like to use for cloaking my Affiliate Links.
http://www.virallinktracker.com/vlt/links/4898.

Granted the links that contain words like “sign up to be my affiliate slave” “buy from me now or else”, “I’ll make money, you might not” are dead giveaways that other affiliate marketers are creatively cloaking their links.

We often wave or honk our internet car horns at each other, as we pass each other on this vast Internet highway we’re all traveling on. There goes another affiliate marketer, who is cloaking his or her affiliate links just like I am. We’re all members of the same big team after all.

I must be a “hard sell” as I’m not easily willing to part with my money. And considering that I haven’t earned anything yet, in my new adventures of Internet Marketing, it might be near impossible for some of those other affiliate marketers to convince me to buy their products.

At least now, I’m less likely to lose those commissions that I haven’t even earned yet. My affiliate links, are proudly wearing their lovely new cloaks. They come in a variety of sizes and colors.

Plus my links and I could use that added warmth. We’re in the middle of that cold, snowy, season here, fondly known as winter. There can be ice, snow, rain, slush, and extreme wind chill factors where I live. I sure wouldn’t want to present ice cold, numb, frostbitten affiliate links to anyone. I don’t think that would go over too well, with my future potential customers.

It’s been recommended that I should have my own product to sell. Maybe I should pick up my knitting needles and my crochet hooks, and start knitting my own hand made cloaks designed to fit a wide range of affiliate links. I’ve got plenty of yarn and different colors to choose from. I have a love for both knitting and crocheting.

My hand made cloaks, will be warm, practical, colorful, and reasonably priced. I’m sure I’ll soon be overwhelmed by the amount of people, now rushing to my blog, wanting to buy a handmade cloak, from me to protect their affiliate links.

I’m glad that my precious affiliate links will now be wearing their nice warm cloaks of protection. They’ll still be wearing them even when it’s 90 degrees outside, and high humidity in the summer time.

I don’t understand why there would be so much protest about having to wear those lovely affiliate cloaks, in warmer weather, but I’m new at all of this.

Wearing a Cloak of Protection

CLOAK YOUR LINKS!

I started looking at my own affiliate links, and it soon became obvious to me, that other people could easily tell I was just another affiliate marketer. The suffixes of the links contain the names of the companies, where I research products, web sites or services that I’m trying to promote.

Those links are practically shouting out, well here’s yet another affiliate marketer, and a newbie at that, who is trying to sell you something! So why would potential customers buy anything from a newbie like myself?

That’s what occurred to me anyway. What didn’t occur to me was that:

“Many dishonest people will do anything they can to prevent affiliate marketers from getting their commission for their hard work. When people see a link that they recognize as an affiliate link they might cut your username off and buy directly from the website or even worse, they might replace your username with theirs and take your commission. Also, some people might be uncomfortable clicking on a link they recognize as an affiliate link….”

Well there go my hard-earned commissions that I haven’t even earned yet!

Your affiliate links are visible for everyone in the Internet World to see. For all of you do it yourselfers, Hannes Johnson, at http://www.selfseo.com/story-13929.php even provides the instructions and the codes if you want to cloak your links yourself. He also provides a list of sites that will cloak and protect your affiliate links for you. Many of those sites are free to join.

I’ve tried a few different sites. With some sites, I wasn’t sure if I should add my cloaked links to a traffic exchange when I didn’t yet have my own web site. Was I just wasting my ad credits by posting them in traffic exchanges?

I can’t yet afford to buy more ad credits as I’m trying to do this on a shoestring budget. Well let’s get real! There is no budget! I haven’t yet made enough money to even buy a new pair of shoestrings that my old, tired, worn out shoes could badly use.

One of the sites that I really like, not only cloaks your links, it tracks your ad campaign and helps increase your traffic. The ads fly in over the main page that you’re viewing. They can’t be blocked from being viewed by your potential customers.

In fact, when I first saw the fly in ads, I ended up clicking on one of the ads, or the web site link itself, more out of annoyance, then anything else. Those fly in ads just wouldn’t go away, no matter how many times I clicked my mouse, or tried to scroll through the page.

Then as I looked at the site and read more about it, I found myself getting excited about it. From an affiliate marketer’s perspective, it automatically increases the visibility of your ads. Your ads rotate in with everyone else’s. In a classified ad site, your ads are static, they just sit there, waiting for someone to come around and look at them, which might or might not happen.

At this site, you get ad credits every time your ad is viewed and you accumulate more ad credits from your referrals. They have email support, which I’ve found to be very responsive to any questions that I had. They didn’t even have any problem with their egos, when I made a few suggestions to them. Sometimes as a user of a site, you can see things that don’t work quite right, or that could be improved on, that the computer programmers and web site designers aren’t always aware of.

It’s easy to set up my links and ads, which as a non-technical computer user, is something I really appreciate. I love seeing how many times my ads have appeared, and watching that number increase every time I visit.

Take a look at this site for yourself. It’s a great way to cloak your links and gives you and your website business, the protection you need to have. Then you don’t have to worry about losing your hard earned commissions, and you can start earning the income you deserve to have!

Source: From an article titled:
“How Cloaking Your Links Can Save You Both Time and Money”
Posted by Hannes Johnson on: 2006-05-03 20:36:30
http://www.selfseo.com/story-13929.php