Travel Affiliates, Hotel Affiliates and Link Cloaking?

[Klaas Koopman]

Hi Stars, ( darn do I learn alot here, thanks! )

Today I made an offer on a site somewhere and see if I can make it better, seo it here and there and hope it will run like a charm! It was an adsense site, so it really needs my webdesign expertise to get better haha.

But now I'm up for the second step, where do I find affiliate programs (that are legit, reall etc, don't like to be scammed)?

And another thing, I see alot of affiliate websites hiding the links when you hover it. Will this increase your conversion, or is going the other way around? People want to see where they are going so they do not click it, perhaps?

Thanks ahead for all the information I already gained and probably will get!

[Rob_TID]

Um, shareasale.com cj.com clixgalore.com azoogleads.com copeac.com hydramedia.com

Hide the links or replace with text - generally it gets a better CTR.

[jcorkern]

Only people who know affiliate marketing will worry about the affiliate links. most of the general population has no clue. I have cloaked affiliate links and have not seen much difference. I think it was a game a few years back to sell some cloaking codes when they first came out.

As far as affiliates that are trustworthy, I would suggest you test, test, test!

That is the beauty of an affiliate site. you can change affiliate programs at will if they do not produce.

Banners, links, whatever. It is easy to change one 120 x 120 banner to a new one in a few mins. And a text link is even quicker to change ( i always prefer text links).

If you set the site up right, by the time you get the SEO working for the travel industry, you will already have a decent idea of which ones produce.

By the way, I hope you are a good SEO if you are targeting the travel industry. I would suggest that you work your seo to local results over national.

Hope this helps.

[Linda Buquet]

One advantage to link cloaking is that you can switch out merchants without having to go find and change links all over your site. If you set up yoursite.com/bestairfare yoursite.com/hotels then if one merchant does not work out you can just change the link in one place - like htaccess or the cloaking program and all the links throughout your site change.

Example. I use GoTryTHIS for all the client links on my site. They aren't affiliate links, I just use the program for tracking clicks AND also for convenience. So for example, check out the AMWSO link top right sidebar. That link is all over the place on thousands of pages of my site. If Chris ever wanted me to change the page I link to, I'd have a heck of a time finding all the links and it would take forever to change them. With GoTryThis, I just go to the interface, replace the link and it changes it everywhere on my site, blog, forum, directory, old newsletters, everywhere.

So if you had a merchant you heavily promoted over time, but then their conversions went south or they pulled their CJ program and moved to Performics, you'd only have to change the link in one place.

Warning though about cloaking - sometimes the way the cloaking works the tracking cookie won't pass, so test. Another warning there are "black hat" cloakers - in fact GotTryThis has a black hat version - I don't use and neither should you. They stuff cookies and use iFrames which are against the TOS for most programs.

In fact even in the WhiteHat version of GotryThis that I use, you need to be careful. If you use the option that asks you to add a link title - it then uses an iframe. I added a link title once, not knowing what it did and my client complained he was not getting hits from me because the link was iframed so he could not track any traffic I sent him.

[Linda Buquet]

Was scanning my RSS feeds and stumbled across a decent article at John Chow that shows 3 easy ways to cloak links.

How To Hide Affiliate Links | John Chow dot Com

[Klaas Koopman]

Thanks alot Linda, rob and jcorkern for your help and information.

At first I will just not use it untill I have the site setup and have some decent traffic.

And about targetting the travel market, I'm doing my best with SEO, but as Linda knows I've got a nice forum which can help me ( john scott's forum ) and has always helped me with tips.