Are You Protecting Your Affiliate Commissions?…

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Are You Protecting Your Affiliate Commissions?…

By Terrance Charles | New Here? Subscribe To Blog RSS...

One of the fastest and easiest ways to get online and make money is what we know as affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing, you don’t need to stock any products, worry about credit card transactions and shipping, or having to have a product of your own to sell.Affiliate marketing is a profit-sharing venture linking a webmaster and an online business.

The website owner is responsible for positioning advertisements on their websites to sell the merchant’s goods or direct visitors to the merchant’s website, when a sale is made, the website owner get’s a profit or commission usually ranging between 30% – 75%, I recommend no LESS than 50%…

There are 3 ways to earn money through affiliate marketing…

You can get paid for clicks such as google adsense. You can get paid for completed sales, whenever a sale is made you get a commission for it. Or, you can get paid for signups, such as when you refer someone else to try out the product or service and you gain commission from that also…

But, are you protecting your affiliate commissions?

Why is this important? A lot of times when you are advertising for a affiliate program, you tend to makes indirect sales, meaning that you may be advertising the affiliate URL and your potential customer chops your affiliate link and goes directly to the merchant’s homepage, therefore cutting your commission and not properly crediting you for the sale.

For some reason, people tend to do this, I don’t think it’s right, if you refer someone to a product or service and they buy it, shouldn’t you get proper credit for it, ofcourse, but some people are ignorant to the fact that they will be earning you a commission when they purchase.

So what do you do about it?

Some affiliate programs have what is called a cookie, which when your visitor visit’s your affiliate website, it leaves a code in their browser that tag’s them with your affiliate referral link, depending on the affiliate program, that cookie can last for a day, a couple weeks, even a couple years, or until they clear their cookies manually.

Those are the type of affiliate program you want to seek, and make sure to read and even ask the affiliate program owner if they have cookies and how long does it last, for example I am with a affiliate program called IMC, they have a cookie that last for up to 3 years, so if that potential customers visit’s my website and does not buy then, if they decide to purchase 2 months down the road, I still get paid for it, doesn’t that sound good?

How do I protect it even better?

Now, here’s where it get’s more advanced in affiliate protection. Cookies are only half the battle but they are a important piece to the puzzle. You have people that will try to abuse the affiliate program by hacking your affiliate URL and replacing your ID with theirs. I know someone that has lost 1000’s in commissions because of this kind of behavior. There are people that actually spend their time looking for people that are new to marketing just to hijack their affiliate commissions because they don’t know as much about protecting it.

And also, affiliates that don’t know to much about protecting it themselves is putting money on the table every time they advertise because they are NOT using this tactic that will potentially stop all commission theft.

Here’s the solution to protecting your affiliate commission…

It’s simple, you want to get yourself a domain name. It can be a full domain name or even a sub-domain name, but I recommend your own domain name. Let’s say for example, your affiliate program ID looks like affiliateprogamID.com/php.t.cgi/12345=hop23 then you can pretty much see why for one, it’s a bad idea to advertise that, and for two, who in the heck is going to remember that?

If you get a domain that just redirected to that affiliate ID, it would shorten it, and you want to use a catchy domain name that has to do with the affiliate program and one that will be remembered.

You want to cloaking or masking. Here’s the good part, cloaking and masking is a option used to HIDE the real affiliate URL. Why is this good? Because, this way when you are promoting your affiliate program using your own domain, your affiliate URL is hidden and there is no way for people that want to abuse the affiliate program to get your URL and steal your commission.

Plus, you can also gain a little bit of search engine traffic when you mask your URL, which you can change the title, description, and keywords so that your domain name has similar content to your affiliate program.

Just this method alone has landed me two great spots in the search engine and brought me continuous traffic for over 1 month and has resulted in sales.

Here’s another GREAT tip…

When you are forwarding your domain to your affiliate URL, it’s highly recommended that you use a link tracking service that will count how much visitors came to your site. Most affiliate programs have these setup, but some don’t have them, and some even not setup properly.

I use a great tracking service called ClickAudit.com which allows you 10 free URL’s that you can use to track. You can place your affiliate URL in one of these trackers, then use the tracking URL and forward it in your domain, this way you know how many people are really coming to your website.

You can even use it for your affiliate promotions to see where your most converting traffic is coming from, because that is VERY Important, you have to know what ad is working and what ad isn’t working.

So in order to protect your affiliate commissions, go with a affiliate program that allows a cookie to be coded with your affiliate URL, get your own domain name related to your affiliate program, be sure to mask and cloak it, and use a link tracker service so you can see how many visitors are coming to your website and where, that will protect your commissions and increase your bottomline, more sales that are credited to you.