Protect your Affiliate ID
30% of your promotion efforts get wasted because of affiliate id theft.
This makes you lose traffic, money and time! So how can you protect your affiliate id to save you traffic, money and time ? Read bellow,
Affiliate id is a numeric or alpha numeric reference, that is associated with a specific user, it is used to track referrals. For example, if you are selling someone’s product online, or giving a link to a friend to join a forum, most likely it has your Affiliate id on that link, so this way the forum owner, or the company for whom you are selling stuff, can track your results.
This way when a new user joins something referred by you, thanks to the affiliate id, they know that it was you that referred that new user.
The fact is — most people don’t click affiliate links nor trust them.
Imagine when you go to a store to buy Product X, you then face an assistance who has a badge saying “Product Y”, who starts talking you over into buying the product Y and not what you wanted, Product X. You know she’s getting commissions off every sale of Product Y, and even if Product Y is good, you will not trust her “objective” opinion, right?
The same goes for online sales. That’s why it is important to “Hide your affiliate id” or to let’s say “Protect your affiliate id”. Know that 30% of your promotion efforts get wasted because of affiliate id theft.
If you write a fantastic review on a product, but when the reader rolls his mouse hover the URL and sees your Affiliate ID there, he will think you are just trying to trick him into buying something that you will receive a commission from, which in most of the cases is true 
Many walk way, other few do buy if interest, but much more, even when interested in what you are selling or re-selling just strip off your affiliate id from the URL, either ways, any of these represents lost sales, lost referrals, lost profit, in one word – LOSS.
But can you play smart? YEP you can play smart and hide your affiliate id!
- It will save you sales.
- It will save you referrals.
- It will give you credibility for your reviews.
Some old methods on hiding/protecting your affiliate id included:
1. The use of an iFrame to hide the link.
The idea would be to load the affiliate page inside your current page using an iFrame, the trick is to make the iFrame vey small so that the reader won’t notice. This is an old method not used anymore. Don use it! Keep reading.
Ex: <iframe src=”http://something.com/affiliate-URL” width=”1″ height=”1″ frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”no”></iframe>
This code opens the targeted URL in a small (and invisible, due to the size) 1px*1px frame.
The affiliate page is there, so the cookie gets set in visitors computer.
Disadvantages:
1. Some affiliate programs do not allow such play with cookies and will BAN you for this, so you have to make sure it’s not forbidden before you start framing.
2. The visitor still has to visit the target URL and sign up / buy your advertised product.
2. Using php-based redirects.
This is slightly time consuming. For every affiliate link you promote, create a simple HTML file in your notepad:
<html><head>
<title>Your Affiliate Id Protection</title>
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”>
<script>window.location=”http://something.com/affiliate-URL“;</script>
<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”1; url=http://something.com/affiliate-URL“>
</head>
<body>
<p align=”center”>You are being taken to the correct page.
<br>If the page does load after 5 seconds, please
<a href=”http://something.com/affiliate-URL“>click here</a>.</p>
</body></html>
Remember to replace the URL for yours in all the 3 spots when you create your own file. When you are done, save it as .php file, under some nice name without mentioning the word “affiliate”, the site’s name itself would be the best idea (e.g. firefox.php, for Firefox referrals). Create a separate folder on your host and call it “recommended”, then upload the file there. Now, the URL you encourage your visitors to click will be http://www.something.com/recommended/text-link-ads.php instead of http://www.text-link-ads.com/?ref=000000 .
You CAN make it an .HTML file as well (just save it as .html and not as .php).
This is an old method not used anymore. Don use it! Keep reading.
3. Using php-based redirects – short way. This is practically same like the method above, but would work only on a php server (you cannot use .html file for this). ALl you need to do is create a file in notepad with the following content:
<?
header(”Location: http://something.com/affiliate-URL“);
?>
… and, follow all the steps from the Nr. 2 technique — save it as file.php, upload to your “recommended” folder and use http://www.something.com/recommended/file.php link in your website to link to the affiliate program.
Disadvantages:
If your reader’s browser does not support redirects, this method will fail, which is why technique Nr. 2 is better — in case auto redirect fails, your reader will have a page offering him to click in order to proceed.
This is an old method not used anymore. Don use it! Keep reading.
Important Notes:
- NEVER use any of the above methods on affiliate id protection, Google Adsense will BAN you. Some affiliate programs do not allow redirects or iFrames. You wont be able to trick Search Engines and your website will end up banned.
So how can you protect your affiliate id ? Read bellow…
The solution is some new webservices that will protect your affiliate id. I use Viral URL.
It’s simple and very easy to set up, you open a Free account with them and upload all the links you want protected, there’s no limit, they then output you new links for you to use, the great thing is, that even when someone is buying or subscribing something from you, your affiliate id is ALWAYS occluded from their sight, even in the browser URL address field, all that shows up is a simple URL, this solves your problems! Your referrals will never know, you keep the sales and the traffic, and it’s all Free and accepted by any service you’re currently affiliated with.
