Link Cloaking is one way to hide your affiliate id. Many times link cloaking is closely tied in with link shortening. It merely comes up with a random subpage that is basically meaningless. The bit.ly service is a link cloaking service, as is goo.gl.

A better alternative is to do what is known as Redirecting. In other words, the link appears to be going one way when it will actually redirect to the intended target. However, instead of the link being meaningless, it can retain an air of branding which is far more desirable than the random links generated by services like bit.ly and goo.gl.

hyperTracker is a paid service that is billable monthly for monthly subscriptions, half year prepaid subscriptions and yearly prepaid subscriptions. In addition to cloaking and redirects, it also provides a premium tracking service for your links.

PrettyLInk Lite is a free plug-in script for WordPress that accomplishes the same thing. There is also a paid “PRO” edition with extra features for SEO that can be installed across multiple websites. Both will redirect your link(s) to <yourwebsite.com>/brandingsub and feature tracking so you can see which IP addresses hit your site and take the link(s).

After installing PrettyLink, make a habit of changing your affiliate URL in any banner ads you might use!

And when you buy PRO, you are automatically enrolled in the PrettyLink Affiliate Program!

PrettyLink has a reporting feature where you can download your hits to a text file or to a csv file for import into a spreadsheet like Excel. This makes it easy to identify and eliminate bots crawling your site, your own IP address if you do any testing at all and the date and time of day. With the PRO version you can also filter out bots and your own IP Address. That leaves you with a true snapshot of visitors hitting your links.

There are a number of free cloaking services and products out there. PrettyLink is the only free one that I have experience with and recommend. You may know of others so feel free to share in the comments section.