Affiliate Link Cloaker
Affiliate link hijacking and affiliate link bypassing are the dirty little secrets of Internet marketing that no one ever talks about.
Hijacking is what happens when someone replaces your affiliate id with theirs in the affiliate link. Let’s say your affiliate ID is live-well and the product site is www.ebookaboutcats.com. Then your affiliate link would be www.ebookaboutcats.com/?live-well.
Say the highjacker uses the affiliate ID of captain-hook. What he would do is replace your ID with his, and buy from the URL www.ebookaboutcats.com/?captain-hook.
The bottom line: You don’t get your commission, and the hijacker puts your money in his pocket, in the form of a discount, by buying through his own affiliate link.
Bypassing is what happens when someone sees an affiliate link and is either unfamiliar and uncomfortable with it, or just can’t stand the idea of your getting a commission (even though you’ve done the work to put the information in front of them).
So instead of buying from www.ebookaboutcats.com/?live-well, the bypasser will simply “chop off” the affiliate ID at the end and simply buy from the plain URL www.ebookaboutcats.com --without your affiliate ID attached!
The bottom line is the same: Once again, you’ve been robbed of your affiliate commission. Unfortunately, as long as people can see an affiliate code in the link that you offer them, a certain number of them are destined to hijack it – or bypass it.
Just Click On:
There’s a lot of discussion on the net about whether cloaking is acceptable. The issue is that there are some internet marketers out there who use cloaking as a deceptive practice, to hide who they truly are, and allowing a web surfer to think they’re someone else. My understanding is this: while cloaking for deception is bad, cloaking for protection is good. You see, there are other bad guys out there who think nothing of stealing your affiliate links. Stealing your affiliate link means they can claim the commissions YOU should have received when a customer clicks on one of your links. The only way to prevent this is to cloak you affiliate links. This will thwart the bad guys. So, I repeat: while cloaking for deception is bad, cloaking for protection is good.
Always practice safe internet e-commerce. Cloak you link!