While perusing ClickBank today, I came across a program named "Affiliate Link Cloaker". It protects affiliate links from hijackers and the like, preventing the theft of one's affiliate commissions. My first response was to be amazed that anyone could sell such a thing, as easy as it would be to build one. But then, I'm a programmer, so what seems simple to me isn't necessarily simple to everyone. I clicked through and read a little and discovered that it has a few features that some people would find worth paying for. But I decided that I could easily build a tool with all the features I need, which would be even easier to use. Thus was born AffiliCloak (free download).

I've been doing some cloaking of my affiliate links for a while, but only for ClickBank links. AffiliCloak also handles Amazon.com and AllPosters.com links, and can be easily modified to handle others. It can either hook into a 404 page or operate on its own (in case you can't configure your own 404 page). Next step: write code to cloak Amazon.com and AllPosters.com links on the pages where I'm using CaRP to display their affiliate links.