The one CRITICAL mistake many affiliate marketers make

Jul 6th, 2008 | By Barbara | Category: Affiliate Marketing, Make Money, Make Things Simple, Niche Marketing

EEEK!Do you know what the number one critical mistake many affiliate marketers make?

Shhhhh, be very quite and I’ll whisper it in your mind!

It’s…..

Not cloaking their affiliate link.

Now  now, hold on and let me explain.  I DON’T mean, hiding the final destination resource or even covering up the ‘rover’ tag from ebay….instead, I’m focusing up

Stolen affiliate commissions.

With some vendors such as Clickbank, it’s very easy to do!  Consider your typcial Clickbank Affiliate ID:

http://seoprofits.lingstar.hop.clickbank.net

The "seoprofits" is the affiliate (if it was you, you’d put in your clickbank ID here). 

The "lingstar" is the vendor.  The above link points to my 21 Days to a More Profitable Blog product.

Now!  Let’s say that I’m an affiliate, I review the book….and I include the above uncloaked link to the product.  What happens next?

Plenty of ickyness, let me tell you!  Anyone who has a clickbank ID can peruse my review, say,

Golly Gee!  I wanna buy that!

And substitute in their OWN clickbank ID for the link, like, oh,

Test it out yourself!

Use the above link to visit the page and click ORDER (but don’t fill in anything yet!)

Scroll down to the bottom – you’ll see:

[affiliate = richhermit]

Now try:

Click order again, and you’ll see:

[affiliate = earlobe]

Do you know what that means?

That means that if you leave uncloaked links in your recommendations, people can substitute in their own ID and claim the affiliate commission, thus stealing it from YOU.

Not good, eh?

Luckily, there are several ways around this!

One, you can hack it yourself – I describe this over at my affiliate tutorial.

Two, you can get more insights at my article

 and also enjoy:

Remember – you’ve done the effort in reviewing affiliate products…it only makes superb sense to obtain the commission you deserve.

Enjoy!

Barbara Ling

 


#BEGIN highlights of this blog writing post:

Beginners blogging tips:  Some things are worth paying money for.  Affiliate link cloaking is one of them, Ninja is what I recommend.

Intermediate and/or Advanced blogging tips: If you’re a techie geek, you can also use subdomain redirects like http://stripe.barbaraling.com .

#END highlights of this blog writing post


Like this post? Please feel free to tell your friends and Digg It – I very much appreciate your time!

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Related posts:

  1. How to easily cloak your Clickbank and other affiliate links for free
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  3. The One Tool All Affiliates MUST Own – past and present and future links, one-step additions and more
  4. Making certain you keep your affiliate commissions from being stolen
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3 Comments

  1. MitchNo Gravatar (21 comments.) on 06.07.2008 at 08:45 (Reply)

    Very interesting post. It’s never occurred to me that people could steal my link in that fashion.  Maybe that’s why Commission Junction offers you the opportunity to cloak your link; hmmm,…  Thanks!

    Mitch’s last blog post..Some Stats From June

    1. Barbara Ling, Virtual CoachNo Gravatar (44 comments.) on 06.07.2008 at 08:58 (Reply)

      My pleasure!

      Cloaking links has been a MUST DO now for me ever since I started taking affiliate marketing seriously….back in the early 2000s.

      Glad it helped,

      Barbara

      Barbara Ling, Virtual Coach’s last blog post..The one CRITICAL mistake many affiliate marketers make

  2. [...] the weekend, I wrote about The one CRITICAL mistake many affiliate marketers make .   This particular mistake can cost you your hard-earned affiliate commissions…but [...]

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