Protect Your Affiliate Marketing Commissions: Stop Commission Theft

If you’ve been bringing in some nice affiliate marketing commissions and then suddenly, the leads and sales drop off, your site may be experiencing some link theft. It’s a problem that’s been around affiliate marketing for a while but there are steps you can take to do something about commission theft.

Parasite-Ware Not Hacking

You’ve done the work to build a website, targeted the right keywords, and pre-sold your visitors, so after all that hard work you’ve sent the customer off to the merchant to make a purchase. It’s maddening then when a hijacker takes away your affiliate marketing commissions using ID-stealing parasite-ware!

How Commission Theft Works

We should first point out that it didn’t happen because someone hacked into your site files on the server and replaced your affiliate ID numbers with theirs. The chances of that happening are very remote.

But spyware does exists that can hijack your affiliate ID and replace an affiliate marketer’s unique number with theirs. It only works if the spyware is already present on the end user’s machine. It was likely downloaded from a file-sharing site such as Kazaa, or a social networking site such as Intermix’s MySpace, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Once on a user’s PC, the spyware monitors which sites they visit, and if the user lands on a targeted merchant, then it takes action. It over-writes your link ID code with its own and takes credit for any potential sale and the resulting commissions.

The only thing you can do is partner only with trusted third-party networks such as Commission Junction or Shareasale which do not tolerate parasite affiliates in the ranks -- such as those who use floaters. (See our article on Beware of Affiliate Marketing Scams.)

What we need to focus on then is on a type of link hijacking you can do something about. We are talking about commission theft from users who realize they are about to click on an affiliate link -- and deliberately chop off the ID from the URL.

Cloak Your Affiliate ID: Get the Software

One of the easiest methods to solve the problem of hijacking affiliate marketing commissions is to battle software with software. Programs such as Affiliatelinkcloaker work effectively to cloak your links to combat the hijacking.

How Link Bypassing is Done

Savvy consumers who know about Internet linking may see your affiliate ID in the status bar at the bottom of their screen when they mouse over the hyperlink. For some reason, they choose to bypass your link, by typing the merchant’s URL directly into the address bar. Or, they simply delete your ID from the end of the URL address and go off to the merchant’s site without you.

The link bypass is especially aggravating as it means the customer either doesn’t want you to get any of your hard earned affiliate marketing commissions or is leary of the long URL address + strange code at the end.

Don't Lose the Sale

In any case, affiliate marketers stand to lose the sale or lead once this customer leaves your site. Anti-commission theft software such as Affiliatelinkcloaker.com can overcome this problem in about 80% of the cases. Even if the web user has the Java disabled on his computer and Java cloaking scripts are rendered useless, the software will still solve the problem.

A similar piece of software is from thehiddenaffiliate.com which offers the poor man’s version of cloaking. It’s less expensive, easy to use, and also helps you with keyword conversion tracking which is so vital for achieving optimum affiliate marketing commissions.

Another advantage to owning your own software for link cloaking is the ability to put the encrypted and secure page directly to your website’s server. Affiliate marketers can’t always trust a “link shrink” site, such as tinyurl, to always be there. Plus, why would you trust your hard-earned commission to a third party site to do your link cloaking for you? (And what if they’re the ones doing the hijacking?)

Building websites is a lot of work and if your primary revenue comes from affiliate marketing commissions you must be pro-active in protecting your links and conversions. The price you pay for the software will be recouped in just the few sales that you might have lost had you not had this important tool.

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