How to Stop Your Affiliate Links from Getting Hijacked

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 at 4:08 pm

So you made an incredible auto-responder email series, you wrote mountains of amazing articles, and you have an extremely catchy capture page that draws in the prospects. Yet somehow you’re getting almost no results and you don’t know why. Sounds familiar? I know this is a fairly normal issue, but it’s unusual that marketers still haven’t worked out what the cause is.

I’ll try to re-iterate a little on what’s happening to your sales throughout this article. Opposite to what you may be thinking – it is completely possible that your sales funnel is Generating masses of sales, but you’re not realising any of the revenue. Obviously this is a pretty big issue that you’ll want to take care of as soon as possible.

Basically what’s occurring is this: the user is changing your affiliate ID to their own, or spyware on their computer is doing it. Both of these will stop you from getting credit for the sale even though you’re the affiliate who made it. There’s no way that you can stop them from doing that, unless you disguise your link.

Link cloaking is when you program a redirect on your website that disguises affiliate ID’s and makes it impossible for spyware or users to stop you from obtaining your sales.

I hope you realise the difference this could make, you may be giving someone else most of your leads already. Instead of making income from your sales funnel you could be just handing it off to someone else.

Even if you made sales all the time without difficulties, a portion of them may still be snaffled. It shouldn’t hurt anything to start cloaking your links so you lock in the sales. The difficulty is that it can be hard to make a safe link cloak, unless you’re a programmer (or something of that nature).

Instead you can utilise one of the many link cloaking services on the internet, but I wouldn’t suggest you just use the first one that you find. A number of them will actually mess up the tracking cookies and you STILL won’t get credit for the sale. You want to make sure that you’re using a cloaking service designed for affiliate marketing – and there aren’t nearly as many of those.

I have heard horror stories of affiliates who utilised redirection services such as TinyURL and Bit.ly – apparently they are well known for often screwing up affiliate links and not giving you credit for any sales. Most other link shortening services will have these problems as well.

The best link cloaker is one that you can place on your own website so you will not have to be frihgtened about anything breaking down or not functioning correctly. As I said earlier though, this can be difficult to make if you aren’t a programmer – or willing to employ one.

I recommend you go here and get this free report about link cloaking and the top services for affiliate marketers: {!reportlink}. I don’t know of any better place to learn what works, and what doesn’t.

Discover more about link cloaking in the free Cloak and Dagger Affiliate Secrets report. Feel free to pass on this article in any form as long as you include this resource box. You can also add your affiliate link if you sign up at Clickbank Pirate.

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