Have you ever wondered if you are losing some of your affiliate sales? I have, and apparently it is something that a lot of people experience but most don’t even know it is happening.

Take this for example: You are marketing a ClickBank product through their affiliate program and someone sees your ad and likes the product. In a perfect world they will click your link and make the purchase…but this world is far from perfect.

Instead of buying it from you they sign up for the same affiliate program create their own hoplink and buy the product, thus making a commission on their own purchase. If there is a policy against this, it would not matter, as all they have to do is make the affiliate account in a friend or relatives name.

<Rant Mode> I just realized that me writing this is opening up a whole new avenue for stupid scammers who could not think of a scam like this on their own. It is not my intention to provide this type of info to dubious individuals, so if that is who you are…piss off…I don’t want you here. This information is for people trying to protect themselves from scum like you! </Rant Mode>

So how can you protect yourself?

All of the so-called-experts say that the best thing you can do is mask your affiliate id in your link. Out of sight is out of mind so-to-speak. Perhaps they are right…personally I do not know, but I do know this…if someone wants to bad enough…you can’t stop them from stealing your sale.

Masking will probably stop a newbie or amateur but a pro hacker will get through this is in a matter of seconds…which sucks. Anyway, going with the ‘out of sight is out of mind‘ philosophy how exactly do you mask the ID?

Website Re-Direct Service

You could start by using a website re-direct site such as TinyUrl.com – You paste in your affiliate link and they provide you with a unique link. This is probably the simplest way to do it, but personally I find it rather cheesy. To me, it has that ‘rank amateur look’.

Hide the link using mouse over trick

<A href=”http://www.someaffiliateprogram.com?xxxx” onMouseOver= “window.status=’Some other link or message here!’; return true” onMouseOut= “window.status=”; return true”>Click here</a>

Rather easy to do but the actual link can be discovered by revealing the source code.

Use a script to redirect a displayed link to the actual link

This is a method I just started to use. It has rather simple to set up. I just created an html document with re-direct code in it. Here is an example and I have posted comments in Italics. Remove them to make this code work for you:

<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Language” content=”en-us”>
<title>Super Affiliates</title>
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”> important to do this to keep Big Brother (aka Google Happy) <script>window.location=”http://tatumba.affsuper.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=EWEN”;</script> This is the affiliate link
<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0; url=http://tatumba.affsuper.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=EWEN”> same link used again. The content=”0 is a counter that says go to the url in ‘X’ seconds, in this case 0 seconds or immediately.
</head>

<body>
<p align=”center”>You are being taken to the correct page.
<br>If the page does load after 5 seconds,
<a href=”http://tatumba.affsuper.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=EWEN”>click here</a>.</p> Same link used again. This one is in case the script fails to trigger. It is a last resort and will expose the actual link</script>

<I place my Google analytics code is placed here to track this for my goal conversions. It has been removed so someone does not use it by mistake.>

</body>

</html>

Now you would save this as somefile.html and then load it to your server and link to it. Automatically your customer will be redirected to the vendor site.

Another Scripting Method – use PHP

<?php
header(“Location: http://tatumba.affsuper.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=EWEN”);
exit;
?>

A rather easy solution don’t you think?

Encrypt Your Webpage

You could use a fantastic product that will encrypt every page on your site, completely hiding your source code. This one cost money but it does work at hiding your html, thus preventing copying.

Encrypt Your Site

Open Mouth and Insert Foot

So you have spent some money, bought the encryption software and now you think you are safe from an affiliate thief?…Wrong…It may encrypt your site and hide your affiliate ID but it does not hide your affiliate ID on the destination site.

Like I said in the beginning you can make it a little more difficult and attempt to minimize theft by hiding it, but in the end if someone wants to rip you off…they will…and that sucks.

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