A few months ago, I wrote about how to cloak an affiliate link and why you might want to cloak links for affiliate products that you promote. Since that time I have gotten a lot of questions and requests for help regarding that post. That’s great because it means that people read the article and decided to give cloaking a try. I love that. Helping people is the best part of this gig.
The Next Level Of Cloaking
Today I wanted to mention a more aggressive technique for cloaking – cloak an entire page. I was re-reading the Secret Affiliate Code (note the cool cloaked affiliate link) on the airplane on the way home from Singapore, and I was reminded about this method. This is a nice trick of the trade that I forgot about until I re-read this excellent eBook.
Let’s say that you want to promote an affiliate product that is available on a service like ClickBank. Let’s use Secret Affiliate Code as mentioned above as a great example for this case. It has a great landing page that converts really well. Let’s also say that you want to link to the landing page as you promote the product as part of your promotion strategy. Now you could use a cloaked link like I taught in my previous post on cloaking (just like I did above). That would take the user away from your site to the sales page of the affiliate product. That’s a perfectly normal and fine thing to do, and you can make money doing that.
Keep The Prospect “On Your Site”
But what if you want the visitor to have a more seamless experience, and you want the landing page to look like it lives on your domain, not the domain of the seller. Deciding to do this could help reinforce the message to the buyer that you are fully endorsing the product, not just slinging traffic to an affiliate link. Here is an example of the Secret Affiliate Code sales page showing up as if it were on MasonWorld.com.
So, How Can You Cloak A Page?
The answer is by creating a simple HTML file on your site that places the sales page inside a frame. The code shown below, but I recommend you download it from the attached zip file.
Save the zip file to your disk, edit the four things mentioned below, and ftp it to your site. To make the file work, you need to change the following:
WEB PAGE TITLE: Give the page a title that matches your keyword strategy for the promotion. This is especially important for a good quality score if you are driving Adwords to the page.
KEYWORDS: Put your keywords in here. You want to have these there, but it is not as critical as it used to be. Google pays very little attention to these.
DESCRIPTION: This will show up in your listing on Google. Make sure your keywords are here as well as a call to action for the Googler that makes them want to click on your search engine listing.
GA CODE: Be sure to turn on Google Analytics for the page. This is another major advantage of this technique. You can get Google Analytic data for the visitors that you send to the sales page.
Be sure and save your “cloaking file” file with a file name that includes your keywords and ends with the .html extension (like secret-affiliate-code-discount.html or whatever). Alternatively, you can rename this file index.html and put it in a directory called secret-affiliate-code under the public_html directory. That gives you a URL like this:
http://www.latenightim.com/secret-affiliate-code-discount.
I hope that you find this cloaking method useful. Thanks to Craig Beckta of Secret Affiliate Code for reminding me about it.
Best regards,
Mark
P.S. Here is the code (see also the zip file):
