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There are a lot of things you can really do to enhance the way you set up new affiliate marketing campaigns. Outsourcing, scripts, and tools all help the big money makers minimize work done to create big profits. One thing that many do, including myself, is to cloak. Now there are several different reasons to cloak, and tons of ways to do it. I get asked about it very often, so I want to go over some of these reasons.

Let’s start off with answering the question of what is cloaking? Wikipedia gives one definition with a basic idea which can be applied to further uses -

“Cloaking is a black hat search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different to that presented to the user’s browser. This is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page. When a user is identified as a search engine spider, a server-side script delivers a different version of the web page, one that contains content not present on the visible page. The purpose of cloaking is to deceive search engines so they display the page when it would not otherwise be displayed.”

Lucky for us, though, that it isn’t just a black-hat method for SEO purposes.

Basically, the goal is to show one group of people a mock landing page, offer page, or some other website, while we send all those we are targeting in our ads off to the real offer. Now, why would you set up this cloaking? What use does it really have? Who are we trying to block? Simple. The people approving our ads. We know the Google staff can be a pain in the ass to get any affiliate offers through. Facebook loves to disapprove just about anything if they think it is just a tid-bit to edgy for the general public.

Now, we have a way to trick those crummy interns into thinking we’re advertising a nice, free mature dating website, while in actuality we’re sending them off to f*ckbook.com or some other erotic dating site. What we normally could never get an ad approved for and would result in getting an advertising account closed, we can more easily get approved! Now that’s some hardcore black hat stuff!

I’ll focus on Facebook cloaking since that is where many of us affiliate marketers are advertise, and cloaking on Google is nearly impossible without a very, very advanced (and expensive) cloaking script.

If you don’t already have it, get the Facebook Cloaking Script from AffiliatePlex. It’s free and very simple to use. I won’t talk about setting it up, but you will need your own hosting (and preferably, a VPS or dedicated server. I recommend Wiredtree for all your hosting needs.)

The Wikipedia description above talks about content delivery filtering via IP address or the user-agent. The script here used IP-filtering, as well as referrer cloaking. Referral cloaking simply means that if the user that clicks on our ad comes from a specified referrer (website URL), they will be cloaked to our mock page or whatever website we want to send the ad reviewer to. In the script above, you’ll see that Facebook referrers come from:

• dev.facebook
• devrs001.facebook.com
• /intern/ads/review.php
• /intern.facebook.com/
• review.php

You can double check this by looking at Analyze > Referrers on Prosper202. If you see one of these in the list, it means someone from Facebook was clicking on your ads. Now we can’t be sending Facebook ad reviewers off to Adult Friend Finder, but something like SinglesNet should work. If every Facebook ad team member comes from the referrers above, they’ll never see we’re actually sending real users off to Adult Friend Finder. Awesome.

Unfortunately, not every ad team member shows their referrer, so this method isn’t 100% full proof. Another thing this script does, though, is collect IP addresses into a database and will automatically cloak any hits from those IP addresses with or without one of the above referrers. Great. This ads a much better chance that we will be able to stop ad team members from catching us.

That’s all this script does though. It’s great for a base, but it isn’t very thorough. I’d say you’d only have a 50-50 chance of getting away by using this script, and after a few days, they’ll just go back and retroactively disapprove the ad, and possibly shut down your account. That’s no good for us, is it?

This is where customized scripts come in to play. I know nothing about programming, other than a few simple Java lines that print out “Hello World!” But, we live in a world where some people aren’t as technically challenged as I am, thankfully. If you can’t do it yourself, get someone else to beef up this script for you.

First, I had the programmer integrate this in to Prosper202 for me. Whenever I create a new link, I have the option to cloak or not, and I can specify what URL I’d like to cloak to. Then, I added the ability to manually add and delete IP addresses through a simple to use GUI. I also have a window set up to show me when the latest click was cloaked, where they were from and what IP address it was from. Then, we’ve got the first-click cloak option. The first click on any new link I make is always cloaked, and that IP address is added to the cloaking database if it isn’t already there.

It’s got many other options that beats the basic Affiliateplex script to a pulp. Here are some options you might want to add to it, as well -

• Ability to add more referrers
• Cloaking by specific country – Facebook sometimes uses IP addresses from other countries to review their ads. I’ve seen UK, Irish and even Japanese IPs snooping on ads shown to the US population.
• Reverse referral cloaking – if you make an ad on Facebook, but you are getting referral hits from PPV traffic or Google traffic, you might want to implement this. It might be something you have to put on your landing pages rather than in this script alone. But what I mean is if the referrer isn’t from Facebook, then they will be sent to the cloaked URL you specify. You’d do this because it might be an affiliate wanting to see your LP or trying to steal your traffic
• Whitelisting – Always allowing specific IPs you give the script to allow you to view landing pages and links from your own IPs

You can go on and on with your modifications. The great thing is, mods to this don’t require much know how, and are very cheap. To get the Affiliateplex script installed in Prosper202 with all my mods, it cost less than $300.

Are there risks that come with this? Of course. If you are caught, and I almost guarantee you will be, your ads will be shut down. Your advertising accounts could be closed, as well. It all depends on how hard you are hitting it and in what niches. If you get caught with adult dating ads or acai flogs, you’ll have your name added to a blacklist along with your credit card number. It can also slow down the loading time it takes to get to your offer or landing page. More database calls and link redirects mean longer load times.

Is it worth the risk? Honestly, I think so. It can help hide your real intentions from ad networks, making it easier to get even legitimate campaigns up. With cloaking, I was probably able to make 3x as much with Facebook last year with campaigns against their terms than simply building affiliate campaigns that they allowed and were already overplayed. Black-hat, yup! But when used correctly, it can be a very powerful tool to make a lot of cash!