Affiliates work hard to promote a product or service, thinking that they will earn commission for that. But it is a soar fact that part of the money can be easily lost by affiliates, so it’s very important to know how to protect affiliate commissions?

One of the easiest way to lose an affiliate commission is to advertise plain affiliate links that have a product’s website embedded: the most simple example is the affiliate program with such link like:

http://www.products-page.com/aff.php?affiliate-name

Let’s say an affiliate promotes his/her affiliate links using an article marketing. Visitors will read the review of the article written by the affiliate and if they like the product they will try to directly buy the product from the product’s site instead of clicking the link provided by the affiliate. So, after all the hard work affiliates get nothing.

Some of the most common problems faced by the affiliates are affiliate link hijacking where another unfair affiliate could easily modify the affiliate code and buy the product via own affiliate link i.e., if a visitor decides to buy the product he will become an affiliate of that product and will purchase the product using his own affiliate link so that he can buy the product and can also get some discount in the form of commission.

Another major problem is affiliate link bypassing where visitor will delete the affiliate’s reference in the link and buy products directly, it is just because some people don’t wish to buy the product by being referred by someone.

This article will explain how to protect affiliate commissions from unfair people and maximize your affiliate profits:

• Link Cloakers can solve some of these problems. It is a special script or software program that directs the user from the entered URL to your desired page.

  For instance, if visitor clicks the link:

  www.website.com/product

  the web browser automatically redirects to:

  www.website.com/product?id=affilate_name

  So, your visitor will not know whether it is a direct link or affiliate link, hence you will be protected from the unfair affiliates.
   

• Use Html Unicode format. Instead of providing the affiliate link in the readable format you can encrypt the affiliate URL with Html Unicode like:

  www.website.com/product?id=-m&#116

  so your visitor can’t understand what it means, he will think that it is the code of the product. If you wish to make this even more effective you can encrypt the entire affiliate URL and place it in the anchor tag of the link and place some image or meaningfull text as the visible link. You can use the text like “Click here to order” or use the Buy Now button but always try to keep your link search engine friendly like:

  website.com/product-name-with-keyword

  as much as possible because it can help you to easily gain more visitors. This way you are assured that the visitor can’t predict the URL of your original affiliate link and you can reap the full benefits of affiliating the products.
   

• URL Redirect. Redirecting is one of the easiest and very secure ways to protect your affiliate commission. To successfully redirect your visitors you have to make some changes to the .htaccess file in the public_html or www directory on your web hosting account. Just include the following line to the .htaccess file to enable redirection:
  
  Redirect /product/ http://affiliate-name.product-id.click2sell.eu

  It is obvious that /product/ is a directory created on your web hosting account. Now, when someone tries to access:

  website.com/product/

  it automatically redirects the visitor to your affiliate link:

  http://affiliate-name.product-id.click2sell.eu .

  So, you will surely get an affiliate commission.
   

• Long Period Cookie Tracking System. Usually what happens is that the visitor may not buy the product immediately after reading about it on your site. He may take the buying decision after some hours or days. When he decides to buy he will only remember the name of the product and will not come back to your site (affiliate link) to buy the product instead he will search for the product on a search engine and buy the product directly from the seller. So, you won’t be getting anything for such purchases. To avoid this situation you can use the cookies which will store your affiliate link on the visitor’s computer and when he visits the sales page of the product your affiliate link will be activated and you will get the profit. Affiliate marketing systems such as Click2Sell.EU automatically places 180 day period cookies, so you can be sure that even if buyer doesn’t buy your promoted product immediately, you will still get an affiliate commission if he/she comes back later and orders the product.

These techniques mentioned so far, can protect affiliate commissions from the unfair affiliates successfully to great extent.

Dear Click2Sell.EU members,

All this past month we at Click2Sell.EU were working really hard to prepare a new system’s version. There were a lot of new improvements and tweaks made that makes Click2Sell.EU an even better system to sell your digital and material products online and of course – run your own affiate program and your whole affiliate marketing business. After new update we have faster Click2Sell reports!

But, let’s start from the major features and new tweaks.

As more and more new merchants and affiliates join and start using Click2Sell.EU system to sell ebooks, software or any other products online, we get higher workload on our side – especially the servers. We put a lot of development hours to make Click2Sell.EU not only a user-friendly system, but we were also constantly improving the overall website’s and member area speed.

Some of the most active Click2Sell.EU merchants noticed that the more affiliates promoted their products, the slower the reporting section became. This reporting section includes all the in-depth statistical Click2Sell reports:

• General Report;
• Daily Report;
• Conversion Report;
• Referral Report;
• Keywords Report;

and Tracking Channels report (can be found by navigating to For Merchant –> My Products –> Tracking Channels).

Read the rest of this entry »

It is almost very simple to get affiliates for your program. If you announce that you will provide good commission for their sales and run a good joint venture campaign then you can see that hundreds of people joining your affiliate program to promote as affiliates. But however keeping them working for you is a difficult task. There are many reasons for which they might leave you. This article will provide you 10 ways to make affiliates loyal and active.

• Good Payouts. The main reason why people join as your affiliates is that they want to earn money. So, if your competitor provides higher affiliate commissions for selling a similar product then your affiliates may stop working for you and will promote your competitor’s product. Hence to keep affiliates loyal try to provide best payout on the internet in particular more than that of your competitors.
   
• Training and Support for your affiliates. Your affiliate will work for you only until he gets some good profit for promoting your product. If he doesn’t have the knowledge about your product then how can he promote it, and it would result in poor performance of the affiliate and after sometime he may lose interest in your product. So, to you’re them working for you provide a affiliate good training and support whenever they need it and also provide all the details about your product to your affiliates. If possible give them the trial version of your ebook or software to check it out for themselves.  A simple trial version or sample of your product can provide much more benefits for affiliates. This way they can gain more knowledge about your product and will continue working for you.
   
• Offer Promotional Tools that make the life of affiliates easy. You should always try to help your affiliates to promote your business by providing some tools and tips. For instance you may provide the logo or the picture of your product or the banner explaining the product instead of expecting your affiliate to create them. In this way your affiliate will feel easy to work with you and will be loyal to you. Provide as much promotional tools as possible. You can easily provide the pre-written e-mail letters that could be used by affiliates during the e-mail marketing campaigns. Provide different sized banners, articles, even the best converting keywords lists for affiliates to use on pay per click campaigns. They will definitely thank you for all your efforts to help them by bringing even more sales.
   
• Instant and frequent payments. Some of the affiliate programs say that they will give out the money to their affiliates only when a certain amount of money is earned as affiliate commission. The affiliates feel this system as bad one because they wish to get their money that they have earned whenever they wish. So, you have to pay them instantly whenever you receive payment request from them. This will create a good impression about you, so you can earn more loyal affiliates. You can use a good merchant – affiliate marketing system that would allow you to process all payments to affiliates.
   
• Offer multiple Payment options for Affiliates. This is another way to make your affiliates loyal and active. In different parts of the world different payment options are famous or supported. So, you have to understand that and provide a lot of payment options for your affiliates which is supported by their country else initially they might work for you and in long run they will feel that transferring money from one payment processor to another is very time consuming and they have to pay heavy fees for every transaction. So, you may lose their loyalty. In order to avoid this situation you may provide many payment options for affiliates.
   
• Maintain good relation with affiliates and be in touch with them. In most of the affiliate programs the product owner himself doesn’t know who his affiliates are. This is not good for a long term relationship, you should periodically encourage your affiliates and greet them and congratulate them for their good work. Contact your best performing affiliates personally and thank them. You might even consider a loyalty program – more sales an affiliate makes – a higher affiliate commission you pay to them. You can offer your affiliates incentives, reward best performing affiliates and much more.
   
• Reward and encourage the best performer. The affiliates who bring many quality visitors for buying your product are the most valuable asset for you. You shouldn’t lose their loyalty at any cost. To keep affiliates loyal you should encourage them by providing some extra money for showing best performance. You can post his name on your site and create healthy completion between affiliates. Increase a commission percentage to such affiliates, so they would feel that you really care about them.
   
• Help affiliates protect their commission – make sure your affiliates get rewarded. Usually people don’t wish to be referred by someone or will try to reduce the price they pay for the product by becoming an affiliate and will buy the product as if it is referred by them. This method will adversely affect the profit or commission of your affiliates and they will lose interest in this job. To keep them loyal towards you, provide some help to them by teaching link cloaking and making changes in their site for legal redirection and lots more.
   
• Make them feel as a part of your business as a friend. Always get feedback and suggestion from your affiliates about how to improve the product and the sales page. They are the correct person to answer or give feedback about your product because they learn about your product and refer it to potential customers. Hence they can give better suggestions. If you provide some incentives for this then they will feel happy and work for you with loyalty.
   
• Provide many promotional offers. You have to periodically introduce new promotional offers in holidays or during celebrations or whenever your sales are down. You may say that commissions are doubled for a month. So, the affiliates will work even harder for you to get more commission during that month, which in turn brings you lot of sales and it echoes for many months.

The above mentioned 10 tips are very crucial to keep your affiliates loyal towards your business and succeed.