Jun

Prevent your affiliate commissions being stolen

admin on June 30th, 2008

When I read the posts on most affiliate marketing forums, one thing that most people concerned are
how to prevent their affiliate commission is being stolen. Before I answer to those questions, let’s look at what most affiliate or referral links look like: http://www.xyz.com/?referid=proson. or http://xyz.com/refid=?123556 etc something like that. If I looked through my archives, I actually did talk about the subject and titled Affiliate commission hijacked?! but today I want to expand the subject a bit more on why you should

hide your affiliate links and how you can do it in technical side.

3 reasons you should hide affiliate links

Some people out there think if they purchase with affiliate links, it will cost them more due to the commissions paid to the affiliates. So what they do is chopped off whatever the last part of the link and type directly on the browser for whatever the domain is. In the example above, it will be http://www.xyz.com/ and nothing more. So if they do purchase you will earned nothing!
Some affiliate programs will let affiliate to purchase from their own links and get a discount. A typical example will be those products sold on Click Bank. So what your visitors do, they simply replace your affiliate ID with their IDs. Therefore you will make NOT any commission if they purchase
Some affiliate links look long and unprofessional. Your visitor will have a hard time to remember or type in your links. So to make your links more memorable, a method to hide your affiliate link is important.

There are a lots of methods to hide your link, but today I will discuss some methods that I will use for your references:

Use a professional link cloaker - There are several free professional online affiliate link cloakers available online. The one I am using is called ViralURL.com The beauty of it is free and you can track your links which you can measure your online advertising efforts. So if you are looking for a professional cloaker, I recommend you to give it a try.
The other method that I will use is using some more advanced techniques like HTML frameset. I know there is someone out there is recommending a PHP redirect solution but the problem is your affiliate link still will be exposed on your visitors browser. So I will use a frameset instead:
```
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=utf-8" />
<title></title>
</head>
<frameset>
<frame name="" id="" frameborder="no" marginwidth="0"
marginheight="0" src="YOUR AFFILIATE LINK HERE>
</frameset>
</html>
```

You just replace the “You affiliate link here” in your HTML editor, save it as a HTML file, upload to your server and that’s it! The only problem with this method is you need an external tracker if you want to measure your online marketing campaign.

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Later I will talk about why link tracking and split testing is important for your online marketing success.
so stay tune!

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