Cloaker are for people recommending products and services as an affiliate. A link cloaker is used to reduce affiliate commission theft.  Now what is a cloaker and why do you need one?

A cloaker are a program service or a script for people who work as affiliates and need to reduce affiliate commission theft. When you join an affiliate program like for example in the click bank market place, you will get a really ugly affiliate link. And when the visitor sees that link he will know that it is an affiliate link and not click on it. Or he will think that it looks really ugly and will avoid clicking on it. Affiliate thiev's will also easily recognize the links.

That is why you need to cloak your links. Most affiliates cloaks their links by using a cloaking program or script to cloak the links. You then will get links like this: www.yourdomain.com/Recommends/whateverprogram.php, this looks much better. This is done by using a php redirect which is just a page with the script uploaded to a Recommends folder on your server. So you got to have hosting and a domain to do this. You can also use a free service like this one: http://linkcloak.com to make a page to upload to your domain. This site makes the page for you and encrypts it for you and it is also free.

You can of cause use sites like Tinyurl, Bit.ly or Budurl and other such services but the problem is that you have no control over the links and how long they will stay functional. And you will also get lumped together with other users who may not be as etichal as you and use the services for bad things and redirecting people to bad neighborhoods on the net. And when that happens these services will get a bad reputation. They are also difficult to remember because they are usually just random numbers or letters. So i would stay away from these if i where you.

You could also buy a domain name for redirecting via the domain name. You put in your affiliate link in with the domain name service provider and get your domain name redirected to the affiliate link. But this will cost you the domain names cost. This is easy to set up and you learn it by doing it once. You could use an info domain which is usually cheaper but it is not free to mask your link with this method. 

Then you have the varying paid for programs. They usually can cost a bit but when you have paid for it and installed it to your server they are easy to use and will work for you depending on how they are configured. Some of them there are a learning curve involved. You have to learn to use them. But i think really that you get what you pay for and some of these programs have other functions that can compliment and make it easier for the affiliate.

Things like if you want to promote directly to a sales page and bypass the vendor’s squeeze page. And also linking directly to a vendor’s order form. These are the benefit you can get from the Easy Redirect script. The Easy redirect cloaker is a script installed to your server. And it comes with easy to follow videos that makes it a walk in the park to install on your own. So i recommend that you check it out and see for yourself if this is something for you. Here is the link to the site where you can watch a demo of the script and find out more about cloaker's: http://cloakerv.com/link-cloak.html