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When you first get into affiliate marketing you'll probably notice that there is a plethora of acronyms and strange words coming at you left, right and centre.
New terminology is being invented every day in the affiliate marketing space, but today I want to focus more on two phrases close to our hearts here at ThirstyAffiliates.
The difference between Link Cloaking and Link Management can often be a fine line, but there is a difference.
What is Link Cloaking?
Link Cloaking refers specifically to disguising a link or shortening it to hide your the affiliate code embedded in the URL that ensures you get paid when someone visits your link.
A link cloaker then is a tool that lets you create a new URL that redirects to your affiliate link in the background.
This is a fairly common tactic used throughout the web and can vary from just using a link shortening service like Bit.ly or TinyURL to something more tailored to affiliate marketing, like our tool ThirstyAffiliates.
What is Link Management?
Link Management is all about managing a number of affiliate links in your portfolio.
It's quite easy to lose track of affiliate links once you've been running a website for even a short while.
Our tool, ThirstyAffiliates, is more than just a link cloaker, it's an affiliate link management tool as well. It can help you keep track of all your affiliate links in one place as well as provide a number of other features tailored to affiliate marketers.
Link management with a tool like ours also means that you only have one place to keep track of your affiliate links.
When you are placing uncloaked links throughout your website and not using a tool to manage those links you are prone to be affected by affiliate networks changing how their links work and when that happens you end up with broken affiliate links all throughout your site.
With a link management tool, when an affiliate network changes their link for a particular offer, you can just change it one and it gets changed all through your blog.
Link management can also extend to categorising your links into different categories, keeping track of how many times your individual links have been clicked and more.
Using An All-In-One Tool
Hopefully, now you have a clearer understanding of the difference between these two terms, but you might be wondering what to do because it sounds like you need both.
We recommend purchasing an all-in-one tool like ours. The investment will pay itself back with just a few commission payments and you will be on the fast track to earning more by being more efficient.
