There’s a lot of debate whether or not a person who has a blog or does any kind of social media type affiliate marketing online should hide or disguise their affiliate links. I’m interested to hear what you think, but let’s talk more about it first.
For those of you who don’t understand, affiliate marketing is where individuals promote a business (or products of a business) in exchange for a percentage of the sales they generate. The actual affiliate link is the link on the individual’s website that points people toward the other business’s product or service. Normally, the link will have some sort of identification tag on the end that helps the business identify who is bringing in the leads and how much commission they will have earned. Here’s the exact affiliate link for the Internet Business Mastery Academy which I will refer to every once and a while here on this blog:
You may notice that I hide some links, while others I don’t. The reason, I’m not exactly sure what to do.
Observations
Here are some observations I’ve made about affiliate links:
- Many internet marketers are afraid that people will be turned off by seeing the “tag” at the end of the link which obviously identifies the link as an affiliate link, one that could potentially earn that person some cash. So as a result, they hide the links (I won’t go into how this is done, but affiliates do have their options, i.e. URL shorteners and PHP scripting).
In my opinion: Not all people will notice the “tag” at the end of the link – and the people that do will totally see your disguise too, and know you’re trying to hide your affiliate link.
- Many people will hide their affiliate links just for the sake of making them shorter, and/or keeping track of your clicks.
In my opinion: If a person is shortening their links so they can tweet them or put them on some other social media platform, then I totally understand – this isn’t hiding, it’s being resourceful. Click tracking isn’t hiding either, although many affiliate programs have click tracking and reporting built in already. I’m more concerned about the links in the middle of blog posts or in email addresses where shortening isn’t absolutely necessary.
- Besides the actual text of the link, there are two basic types of affiliate marketers: ones that don’t explicitly mention the affiliate link and insert it into their posts or email lists; AND those who are blatantly obvious about it.
In my opinion: Being casual or Captain obvious doesn’t make that much of a difference – it’s just a delivery style that a person chooses. However, one should always be consistent or else it might draw some unnecessary attention to your audience. The results will most likely depend on your particular audience. The best thing you could probably do is to split test your blog posts or emails, and see which one converts more for your readers.
What Do You Think?
So, I’m just curious to know how you use and/or respond to affiliate links. If you see one, are you turned off? Has noticing a hidden affiliate link made you think twice about clicking through? Do you think that announcing a link is an affiliate link is a terrible mistake, or the best way to go?
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{ 17 comments (Click Here to Leave a Comment Below) }
As long as you believe in or better, use the product ir service you are doing no injustice to your readers . . . hide or not hide– doesn’t matter.
What ticks me off is a blogger doing “reviews” for products they probably don’t use.
I’m with PP… as long as you’re honest about the product, I think it’s fine.
I’m indifferento. If the author has proven himself enough to gain my trust and attention, then I’ll click. And if they make money on that, I’m happy to see it. If they abuse that trust by sending me to irrelevant garbage a few times, then I’m gone. But it’s all about the content, not about the link style or whether they are making money on it.
It’s not really about trust or attention for me. If I am sitting there reading about a product and am then presented with an affiiliate link I already have a choice.
If I am just tire-kicking and I click, I could have a cookie with an incredibly long expiry period hanging out on my machine. I’m not sure it’s really a good thing if, five months later, I find that the product is what i need through research, word of mouth, whatever, and someone else gets paid for casually mentioning it.
The other issue is making a convincing pitch, converting to a click, but the user can’t buy because they don’t have the cash right that minute some other distraction. With short expiry cookies they can just direct nav back and your work gets cut out.
I think the whole issue of hiding or not is irrelevant. The only people that know or care about affiliate links would know one whether cloaked or not. I also believe that subset of net users is quite small compared to the entire browsing population.
My personal opinion is that it is all about the management of your links. Even if you only mildly push affiliate services, over time you can build a significant number of discrete links. Using PHP, or .htaccess, or a personal URL shortener like Adam McFarland’s Zips.me, allows you to change anything and everything in one place.
Set your affiliate links in a way that works for you, savvy users will know regardless and the rest won’t care.
There is a very good reason not to hide the link. Most people who can recognize an affiliate link are even more gunshy of an obfuscated link. I simply won’t click on a link that doesn’t clearly take me directly where I want to go.
(In this day and age I’m amazed anybody would.)
I say don’t hide the link and be open about it. I’m more likely to buy from an affiliate link if a person is open about it. I recently ran across a product I wanted to buy, and I went back to the source to give full purchase price to the author. The reason being, if you google this ebook, you get a ton of ‘reviews’ from affiliates. It made me feel dirty to use one of the reivews. I’m not sure why, but I felt it the right thing to do.
Interesting topic! As long as the article/site is producing quality content with relevant links, it doesn’t matter to me whether those links are affiliate links or just regular links. The important thing is that the links support the article and that the article is actually interesting. Shameless self promoting for $$$ is the only thing I frown upon when it comes to affiliate links.
I don’t see any reason to hide. As long as you are sincere in your recommendation or review of a product, I don’t see any reason why anyone would have a problem with an affiliate link.
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I personally like to create a hyperlink, but not put the full link out there: to me, it just looks sloppy. I agree with another comment above that you should earn the trust of your readers over time, and that it probably won’t make too much of a difference to them, but I just like the cleaner look. Also, I liked what someone said about making sure that you review the link openly and honestly with your audience.
As a reader I personally don’t like disguised links(either shortened or php scripted). There is just way too much baggage for me to want to give s second thought as to the transparency of the link that I am clicking.
Sloppiness of affiliate link is a good reason to destroy transparency for the reader.
As a writer I want to be able to inspire trust and loyalty. I want to be more focused on gaining people trust that losing a click or two people who don’t trust me. If you gain their trust they will be more than willing to support you in the future.
Finally, as a writer please don’t write stuff just to post affiliate links and please show actual experiences and results when recommending a product.
This discussion has been covered many times at johnchow.com He makes his affiliates blatantly obvious in some spots and hidden in others.
Hey Carl, thanks a lot for the info. I’ll definitely check out some of John’s material on affiliate linkage. Cheers!
If I’m willing to recommend something and there is a possibility for getting paid for my recommendation, I will. I took the time to check something out and use it, so I should be paid for that. ‘Hiding’ a link isn’t something I think of, if I shorten it or do a / from my site, it is for tracking or other such purposes.
As an internet marketing my job is to make money, so my people should assume ANY link from me is an affiliate link, even if it doesn’t look like one. Over 1/3 of my income is from such links, so I’ll do whatever it takes to get someone to click on something I believe in. If more people would click on the link if it was hidden, I would do that. But, that comes from standing behind what I recommend!
I really don’t mind either way if you acknowledge that you have displayed an affiliate link. For example, I’ve seen cases were bloggers acknowledge the links in the article at the end kind of like a disclaimer. If you choose not to do it this way, I like it better when it is obfuscated. If it is obfuscated it says to me “yes I am trying to make a little coin on this link, but I took an extra step to make sure it wasn’t gaudy”.
A bit of an old topic, but a thought -
Considering the nature of this site and how open you are about your earnings and stuff in general, it really would make the most sense for you to be completely open about your affiliate links. It just seems odd that it isn’t clear that you’re getting a portion of the sales of the eHow eBook you recommend, for example, considering how open and transparent you are everywhere else on this site.
For more general thoughts on the subject… I’d say it is situational, but the default should probably be to be open and public about it, especially if you’re reviewing a product on a blog or something. I think most readers will appreciate the honesty and be happy to support someone they like — and I would wager (no idea for sure of course) that the people that would be most put-off by a person openly saying they get a commission on an affiliate link are people that will be able to easily tell if a link is affiliate-based or not anyway, so you probably aren’t really better off in the long run hiding the fact.
I do agree that a split test would be the only reasonable way to say with reasonable certainty though.
It seems to me that most blogs that use Wordpress.org have link cloaking. There are many advantages to cloaking the links. It is not really the fact you want to hide the affiliate links from potential customers, but the fact you are trying to help your SEO.