How To Protect Your Affiliate Commissions

 Well, I cannot believe this day has come so quickly!
It's time to go meet my son's teacher already.... this summer flew by so quickly. 

First, before I go I just wanted to pray that he will get Ms. Bell again (she is the best teacher at his school and I heard she is teaching 3rd grade this year instead of 2nd).
Second, I wanted to just drop a note about protecting affiliate commission.  Read this to see if you know how to protect your commissions.


I found an article that explained this:
"There are numerous software products on the market that range from 15 - 50 dollars for special types of software that'll assist you in protecting your affiliate marketing commissions.  The effectiveness and ease of use for the programs range greatly, so before you buy one, you should always learn as much as you possibly can." (cannot find the author because I saw the same thing on so many people's website). The article reminded me of one way to protect affiliate links that was left out


Banners
Networks that serve banners will also serve and display text links as well.  The link coding that's associated with served ads is normally long, so that the visitor won't be able to see on the URL bar where the redirect is heading. This exception is Clickbank banners.  Your clickbank banner might still show the hoplink in the URL bar. This is not a big deal when selling products outside of the Inernet Marketing niche.  It is not a huge problem in this niche, but anyone who is purchasing a product for the purposes of internet marketing from Clickbank, is likely to be well aware that an affiliate has served that banner for them to click on whereas customer John who wants a clickbank product in the Gardening niche wont even notice your hoplink affiliate name on the payment page.

Click tracking and counting software:
Click counting software will not show the target URL as the links point inwards to the software, which is normally installed on your own website. If you are using blogger, you might be able to install the html code into a gadget on your "layout" screen. Once someone has clicked on the link, the click tracking application will then redirect the visitor to the URL that you have specified within the script.  The click tracking software will also provide a great way to monitor the usefulness of your ads and not just relying on the reports that merchants will provide.




The forgotten (or never before considered) 
method is Link Cloaking!


It is very easy too... sometimes the vendor in your affiliate program will offer link cloaking coding for you to simply paste into your website.
Otherwise, you will need to get a domain name. You can either forward and mask your domain name to point to your affiliate link, or you can use a subdomain.  There is usually no limit to how many subdomains you can have.  I will publish an article tomorrow about the secret hot tricks to use with subdomains. 

In summary...

Protecting your commissions is extremely important, as you want to get paid for what you do.  Even though fraud is possible with affiliate marketing, you can protect yourself.  Fraudsters have certain techniques and tactics they use, which you can protect yourself from.

If you own your own business, the last thing you want to experience is either credit card fraud or affiliate fraud.  They do happen on a regular basis, simply because victims haven't taken the necessary steps to protect themselves, or just didn't know about them.