I realise that using an affiliate link cloaker is definitely a necessity nowadays if you want to do affilliate marketing, as my own experience & the experience of others have shown that visitors are definitely more likely to click on your affiliate links if they are cloaked, compared to just showing your raw & sometimes even "ugly-looking" links as they are. In fact, on a few occasions in the past I was even told by some prospects that they were "turned off" just by looking at my raw uncloaked affiliate lnks which I was using ! :-)
You can see an example of 1 of my cloaked links in my 2nd URL below about an upcoming product launch, in which i used the sofware myAffiliateAssistant. Another great resource I discovered for cloaking affilliate links is at
www.viralurl.com, where you can sign up to be free member & get tools to cloak your own affiliate links.
John Yeng