Morning!
One of the biggest plagues that stalk affiliate marketers today is that of stolen affiliate commissions. And it’s so easy to make it a weee bit more difficult for thieves to suck out their rightful earnings…I’m really surprised not more people take advantage of the following.
Take the very popular merchant, Clickbank. Now, standard affiliate links look like the following:
YOURID.vendor.hop.clickbank.net
So! Let’s say that I wanted to market the great fitness product Turbulence Training. The Vendor ID in this example is turbulence, so my unique link would be:
http://lingstar.turbulence.hop.clickbank.net
Go ahead and click on the link. Work your way to the order page – you’ll see on the bottom:
[affiliate = lingstar]
But! Let’s say that Joe Affiliate Commission Stealer sees that link and decides, Jeepers! I can use my OWN ID instead! and replaces my link with his. ie,
http://smartedge.turbulence.hop.clickbank.net
Click on that link now….go to the order page, and you’ll see:
[affiliate = smartedge]
What’s the end result?
My hard-earned affiliate commission, resulting from perhaps the newsletter I sent out or the blog post I just wrote or the review I just completed….is GONE!
Obviously…this is NOT a good thing. At all!
Luckily, there’s a number of things you can do. You can cloak your affiliate links instead! There are several paid products out there for this, like:
and several others.
You can also do this for free! Here’s how.
Let’s take MY link for Turbulence Training. It’s
www.fitnessbrainery.com/learnabout/turbulence.php
Notice how my Clickbank ID is NOT in the URL!
That php file, turbulence.php, is simply the script:
<?php
$URL="http://lingstar.turbulence.hop.clickbank.net;
header ("Location: $URL");
?>
What’s the end result?
Because you cannot see the source of the PHP file in question from your browser, my commissions are now less likely to be stolen should I send out my affiliate link via a blog post, a newsletter update, etc.etc.etc.
And that of course is a Very Good Thing indeed!
So…if you want to protect your affiliate links, cloak them FIRST before putting them online. Your future income will thank you for it!
Oh, and one more thing – do you use WordPress? If so, check out Ninja Affiliate Cloaker – it lets you cloak past, present and future links within your blog with the greatest of ease.
Enjoy,
Barbara Ling
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PS - Speaking about making money, have you seen:
Fatal error: Class 'expKrc' not found in /home/ling1/domains/virtual-coach.com/public_html/php-bin/eBay_cls.php on line 138
The problem with this php forwarding is that when they get to the affiliate page it usually looks something like:
www.affiliatepage.com/?aff=lingstar
and they can then change that lingstar to their own affiliate ID and steal the commision.
To stop this you need to use frame based cloaking which makes it so that when they click to the affiliate site it still looks like your own site, like:
www.yourwebsite.com/links/affiliate
and that stays in the url bar even when they are on the affiliate site.
You can do this manually but it takes a while. I myself use Cloak N Rotate (www.cloaknrotate.com) to cloak it for me, which does save a fair chunk of time when I’m creating 10+ of these links every day.
Cheers, Phil
NICE!!!! Sometimes affiliate programs will do that extra step for you, but if not, your suggestion is definitely very useful indeed! I’ll play more around with it – thanks for the idea.
It is a huge problem Barbara you are addressing here. As a CB publisher in the past I can say that from logs I have seen way too often when a customer arrived to my sales page with one affiliate link in url but made purchase using different one – most commonly his or her own.
It is sad that perceived anonymity of the internet makes some people think it is “ok” to do it.
Alex
Alex Sysoef’s last blog post..Busy Week = Lots of Fun
Yes indeed. That’s one reason why not only affiliates should cloak links…but CB publishers should offer cloaked homepages as well (ideally, with the AFFILIATES link NOT on the sales page!).
I use www.virtual-coach.com/explore/easyclick.php myself.
Enjoy, Barbara
So is there a “best” way to cloak the affiliate id?
Yes, I do redirects. You can also use iframes too.