It's probably one of the last things that beginning email marketers think about, but cloaking links in your email is a very important part of the process for many reasons.
However, there are problems with the process because of the services people use to cloak their links.
This article is going to explore this issue in some depth.
So sit back and relax.
Okay, the first question we probably have to answer is this one.
"Why cloak links in the first place?" Well, there are several reasons.
For one thing, if you're promoting affiliate products in the make money online niche, not cloaking them is suicide.
This is an open invitation for a marketer to simply replace your affiliate ID with his own, thus stealing your commission.
Another reason is because of economy.
Those of you who use an autoresponder service like Aweber will know what I'm talking about.
In order to keep email lines within a certain length so that they can be easily read by most email programs, Aweber displays a format so that you know exactly where that cutoff is.
Long URLs will go beyond this point.
Therefore, we need a cloak to shorten the URL to a size that will fit.
Still, yet another reason is to make the URL easier for people to remember.
Some URLs are so long that there is just no way that they're going to remember the whole thing.
So cloaking will take care of this problem.
Finally, there is the problem with the domain you're promoting if it's an affiliate product and widely promoted.
Many of these domains end up getting blacklisted and as a result, your email doesn't go through.
However, cloaking has its problems because of the actual cloaking URLs themselves.
See, many of these URLs, because they are so widely used, end up getting blacklisted.
As a result, what happens is that your email doesn't get delivered, similar to what happens when you promote a URL as an affiliate that has been blacklisted.
Kind of ironic when you think about it.
Okay, so what's the solution? Well, the best solution is to use a cloak from your own domain.
You can do this one of two ways.
The one way is to install your own cloaking script on your own domain and use that.
The other way is to purchase another domain and simply use it as a redirect to the site you want it to go to.
You can get info domains for 99 cents.
Whatever you decide, please keep all the above in mind.
There are problems with not cloaking just as there are problems WITH cloaking.
So make sure you're covered regardless of what it is you decide to do with your own emails.
To YOUR Success, Steven Wagenheim