I always worry about this at the very end of things and make sure the most important thing, TRAFFIC is achieved before I worry about possibly losing sales due to non-cloaked links.

But if you have the traffic, are promoting aff links, especially Clickbank aff links, then it is worth doing I guess.

George Brown’s Sniper ebook shows you how to do the free method, and there are also some free wordpress plugins that do the same thing.

http://blog.mcnicholl.com/2008/11/08/for-wordpress-affiliate-link-cloak-plugin-051-beta/

Regarding viralurl, I tend to stay away form those services because you’re basically paying to send emails to people who don’t really know you, and I find that’ its always better to just build and develop your own websites and let people who join your newsletters have a clearer understanding of who is sending them what.

However, if you don’t have traffic or list building going yet, it’s a good way to get those people onto your list to enter your sphere of focused influence.

Re your “helping me to help you” post:

What I’d like you to write about is how to cloak your affiliate ID link. It’s been at the back of my mind for a while (not the best place, I know) but today it moved to the front. After you mentioned Fabian Tan’s article marketing e-book, I looked into him (cautious with my wads of $47 ) and when I discovered him under another name and succumbed to a $17 dollar version – wish I’d seen yours first! – I ended up on his list, of course. A couple of days later the news came that he has teamed up with Frank Bauer, just a name to me but a well-known one, I think.

In today’s message from Aurelius Tjin (Fabian Tan) came a free way to cloak your affiliate ID.

Go to link, find Frank Bauer product, read small print and it seems to be a spam set-up. You may know it – Viralurl. I cancelled and was offered huge amounts of bonuses with private seller rights and e-books and articles and, and, and…

Interestingly (?), no Google searches came up with any information or reviews about Viralurl, only a mass of slymarketer.com pages which wouldn’t open for me in any form.

I went to Nibbo to search and immediately got lots of negative reports.

When I went to the Viralurl site I went minus the Aurelius link, already suspicious perhaps, as I don’t usually remove the contact.

Had I not removed it I would have been receiving spam from 5 people up the chain before me and the results Nibbo gave me showed what the consequences of that would have been: an overflowing mailbox!

But even if I weren’t to get the backchain of spam, becaue of going in “clean”, anyone who clicked the viralurl bar which gets placed on every site would unwittingly become part of the chain after me and get involved in middle man advertising while still on my site!

As a system it seems really good, including both cloaking and tracking of clicks.

Is there an easy and effective way of cloaking without getting drawn in to a web of spam?

Thank you for all your writings. They are a nice place to return to when lost!

Sally