There are a few drawbacks to affiliate marketing, the most prevalent of which is hijacking links, which will cause you to lose sales.

Most people that are just getting started promoting affiliate products do not have their own website, so they are forced to promote the cumbersome link with their special code attached which will track sales so you get a portion of the sale.

The problem is that many people can identify affiliate links and for one reason or another they will remove your link and replace it with another, or just buy from the main site.

There is a solution that is easy and 99 percent of the time, completely free. The solution is called link cloaking.

There are hundreds of sites that will cloak your links at absolutely no cost to you. Some may require you open an account, but many do not. A simple google search for "link cloaking" or "cloaking" will bring up hundreds of results. All you have to do is find a couple of sites you like, enter in your large affiliate link and you will be provided with a shorter, more manageable link. This new link will automatically re-direct to the affiliate site you are promoting.

An added benefit of cloaking your links is that most of these services will also show how many hits your cloaked link has received.

This is very valuable information and you can use it to determine which promotion method you are using is working best.

Say you are promoting an affiliate product on certain work at home forums and also through a few safelists.

If you set up different cloaking links for each source, you can find out which methods are working better than the others and focus your efforts there. This will save you time and increase your profits.

By: Adam Raley

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Adam Raley has been marketing online since late 2006. If you would like to find out more about home based businesses or ways to make money online please visit: Six Figure Yearly or you can also visit his website: Income Generation Online