How to Protect Affiliate Commissions from Unfair Affiliates and Customers Who Don’t Want to Buy via Affiliate Link

· Filed under Affiliate

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.

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