Affiliate Link Hijacking --
Fact or Fiction??
And what it means to you and your commission checks.

by: Kevin Wilke

Recently there has been an increasing amount of talk online about the hot topic of "affiliate link hijacking".

If you are unfamiliar with that term, let me give you a brief example. Let' say an affiliate runs an ad or sends an email recommendation with the standard looking affiliate link of:
http://affiliatesite.com/cgi-bin/12345/IMakeMoneyOffYou.htm

What some marketers of various software and website enhancement products would lead you to believe is that there is a rampant problem of people who are changing your affiliate link into their own before they purchase the product you advertised to them, thus not allowing you to receive credit for referring them. However the data does not support that assumption.

Here's the real scoop...

Like they say, "Documentation Beats Conversation", in the last 12 months, after selling more than $650,000 as an online merchant, paying out more than $130,000 to affiliates, and earning more than $100,000 from the various affiliate programs I promote, I have a very good understanding of what is really happening because of my unique insight on both the affiliate and the merchant side of Internet business.

There is bad news, but there is also some great news.

First, the bad news...

Yes, I've found that an average of 30 to 40% of affiliate commissions go untracked. That means that for any given promotion, recommendation or marketing you do for an affiliate program, you are not going to receive credit for 30% or more of the sales that you generate - due primarily to the 3 main reasons I've identified below - because they were not tracked properly to you.

Disheartened? Don't be.

In just a minute, I will show you how to cut the number of lost sales down to virtually zero.

So why are you losing so many commissions?

It all boils down to 3 main reasons. Let's first look at those reasons and then I'll show you how to stop them from happening.

   #1) The Deleted Cookie.
Almost all affiliate programs today use a cookie to track sales because this is the only effective way to track sales of returning visitors. The way you lose the commission, though, is you refer people to a site, the cookie is set, but when they later come back to the site to buy, the cookie has been deleted from their computer and the sale therefore goes untracked. The most common way this happens is expiring cookies or manual deletion - the common occurrence of people clearing their cookies and "cache".

   #2) The Cut-Off.
Instead of going to www.company.com/cgi-bin/12345
they go straight to www.company.com
For whatever reason, some people (a significant percentage of people) don't like to be tracked, don't like someone earning money from their purchase, etc... so they go straight to the parent site by cutting off all of the obvious tracking stuff, in this example the /cgi-bin/12345, which means you won't receive credit for referring them.

   #3) The Turn-Off.
Most people, when they see an affiliate link, or even a redirect on the referrer's website (the basis of all of the "new solutions" that have popped up as of late) know that they are being sold to. Regardless of how well-meaning and unbiased the recommendation may be, it is all lost because that reader's "sales guard" goes up and it kills the honest recommendation.

How to fix these commission-robbing problems.

There are several options available to you as an affiliate.

   Option #1: Do nothing.
The first option is do nothing and continue to just use your normal affiliate link without using any of the link protection methods available to you. Definitely not the best choice, because it means you are always losing out on 30 to 40% of the sales you should be earning.

   Option #2: Redirects on your website.
What this means is you set up a page on your website and have it redirect to your affiliate link using a meta or javascript redirect. This requires you to have your own website that you can upload new webpages to and you also know how to create redirects (it is a bit technical). You can get the technical details on how to do it here:
http://www.davesite.com/webstation/html/chap15.shtml

The way it works is like this: you would create a page "makememoney.html" that uses the meta refresh to send your visitors to your affiliate link, and then you upload that page to your site and advertise the link -
http://www.mysite.com/makememoney.html

The positive is you eliminate the "cut off" links, on the first visit anyway (problem #2 above), but this still does not fix the other two problems. Plus, it is pretty darn technical. Also, if somebody tries to use the back button, they are stuck in a refresh loop that keeps them from being able to go back to the previous page, not very visitor friendly.

   Option #3: Domain frame-forwards.
You register a domain name and have it forward to your affiliate link hidden inside an invisible frame.

What that means is you register a domain (like mydomain.com) that consists of a targeted or benefit-oriented name and then have it seamlessly forward to your affiliate link inside of an invisible frame, so that your great sounding domain name is held in the browser during the entire visit to the merchant's site.

This is the best way to protect your affiliate link and also the easiest. In fact, I've used it to practically triple my affiliate sales overnight, and have been using this method ever since.

Let's see why it works....

How a domain frame-forward eliminates the 3 main reasons for untracked commissions.

   1) Fresh cookies.
Since your domain stays in the visitor's browser, your domain is what they remember to go back to and also what they bookmark. That means when they return to make a purchase at a later date, they are secretly going back to your affiliate link (that is hidden inside the invisible frame of your domain). So this solves Problem #1 "The Deleted Cookie" because if the cookie had been deleted or it expired, it is now set again and you receive the commission.

   2) Stealth forwarding.
There is no way for them to "cut off" the affiliate code because it is hidden in stealth mode behind your domain name. They never even see your affiliate link. All appearances indicate they are just visiting the merchant's main website.

   3) Open minded visitors.
And that leads to the last issue, the "turn off", which could very well be your biggest foe.

By using a domain, you've removed the negative association of a commissionable affiliate link that obviously indicates you are going to make money from the referral.

Properly executed, this solution produces amazing results because your referral has all the appearances of the honest, unbiased recommendation that it is. This allows your audience to properly evaluate what you are recommending without their "sales guard" up. Which not only decreases the amount of lost commissions, but has the double-whammy effect of increasing the number of open-minded visitors who want to click on your domain.

In today's advertisement saturated society, where there are ads on grocery carts, ads on gas pump handles, and the TV commercials are longer than the programs, people are just plain tired of being sold to.

Then they log onto the net to do some research, and they are inundated with the spy cam pop-up, pre-approved credit cards, and make a million bucks in your sleep by 6 am tomorrow scams....

You won't believe how hungry people are to get an honest endorsement with a real domain name. "Sales guard" goes down, conversions go up.

How to start using a domain redirect...

There are many companies online that now offer domain registration, and a few of them also offer some form of basic redirection service. However, there is only one company that has taken domain registration and bundled it with a specially designed frame-forwarding service for affiliate marketing.

www.NameStick.com

NameStick.com focuses exclusively on helping affiliates maximize their affiliate commissions through their advanced NameStick domain-forwarding service. I have also found their service to be the easiest to use, just point and click and you are up and running.

There are several additional benefits of NameStick that go beyond the scope of this article - things like being able to get listed in the search engines, using your unlimited email forwarding addresses, and how to effectively use your unlimited subdomains, but that is another topic for another day.

The bottom line is this. The real problem is not "link hijacking", which can only really be solved by the merchant not allowing a customer to get a "discount" by buying through their own affiliate link, thus destroying the whole purpose of an affiliate program. (This is a whole other article by itself, you can read this revealing article here.)

Instead, the real reasons for lost commissions can easily be prevented by using domain name forwarding services like www.NameStick.com, causing a nice increase in your monthly affiliate commission checks.

Kevin Wilke has been successfully marketing on the internet since 1996. He is a master at maximizing revenue and profits with websites and putting them on autopilot - meaning how to work less and make more. Many of the top affiliate programs on the internet see Kevin among their most successful affiliates.

He is also the founder of the first performance based marketing company, PureNetProfits.com. Some websites that are managed or owned by that company are www.InternetTaxHelper.net, www.DNAofSuccess.com among others. He is also the co-founder of the hit website, www.SaveYourName.com

Copyright (c) Kevin Wilke -- kevin@purenetprofits.com
(If you would like to share this article or publish it at your site or in your newsletter please email me for permission.)