Protect Your Affiliate Income by Protecting Your Affiliate Links
The whole point of stealing is to make easy money off of the hard work of others. This is a concept that is of course, alive and well on the internet. This has also translated to affiliates and their links. When you sign up to become an affiliate, you are given a link. When someone signs up for a service or product from this link, you are given a commission. In the end, the only way to make money from this affiliate program is to have people visit or make a purchase through your own private affiliate links.
Crimes are usually ingenious and you wonder why a criminal will choose to come up with new ways to steal instead of putting their knowledge and brains into something legal. This can be said for the stealing of affiliate links.
Criminals will steal your money and commission by replacing your affiliate links with their own. You may not even realize it for a time. If you have high commissions from a few different affiliate programs, you may wonder why your sales have taken a nose dive. A closer look at your affiliate links may show that they have changed.
There are two different ways that you will most likely lose money from your affiliate links. The first is a thief who switches your affiliate links with their own personal link. They may notice that you have a great website with a lot of visitors and assume that you make a lot of money from your affiliate links. This can be done by hacking your computer, sending viruses, Trojans and worms or they may be someone that you have commissioned to write content. Always check your links carefully.
Another way that you lose commission is from a regular website visitor. For some reason, we as humans sometimes hate to see others succeed. A visitor may mouse over your link or banner and notice an affiliate link. Instead of clicking the link, they will either type in or copy the main part of the website URL and cut off your affiliate link. This prevents you from getting a commission if your link was not used. There is no reason for it except some people do not like to know that you have made money because they signed up under you.
How to protect your links
To protect your affiliate links you can try a website such as tinyurl.com. At this website, you can redirect your affiliate links to smaller and more attractive names. This will prevent most visitors from realizing that it is an affiliate link which can prevent theft and boost your affiliate sales.
Cloaking software is another great choice for your affiliate links. It does the same thing that tinyurl does, so you have a choice between the two.
You can consider buying a domain name for your affiliate links. You can try to pick a wide term that can cover most of your affiliate programs under a certain keyword or if you make a lot of money, you can buy a domain for each affiliate link. Another way to do this is to use your main domain name and create sub-domains to redirect your links. It can be an extra annoying step but it can also be worth it, when your affiliate links translates into commissions.
Jude Wright has been the owner of http://aboutaffiliatemarketing.com since 2002. Stop by and pick up her free report, Newbie's Affiliate Guide.
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