Control Your Affiliate Links Or Lose Money

Written by John Delavera

Imagine this scenario: You have created an ebook with 10
affiliate links to some of the very best programs on the
Net.

You managed to distribute your ebook to some 1000s of
people - it wasn't easy, but you did it.

You start getting some good commissions through your
affiliate links spread throughout your ebook...

And one day...

You get an email saying that 6 out of the 10 products you
promote changed their affiliate systems... And, your old
affiliate links will stop working in 15 days...

What can you do to regain your success?
The answer is NOTHING. Nothing at all.

You just realized that you are a bad affiliate.

The good affiliate does not worry about this change because
he/she knew what to do when creating his/her ebook in the
first place.

The good affiliate did NOT use the links provided by the
products he/she promotes. Instead of the standard links,
he/she used HIS/HER own links residing on his server.

What the good affiliate will do to rectify this situation
is to change 6 files on his/her server and the good work
will continue... Commissions will still be coming...

In this article, I am going to tell you how to control your
affiliate links. If you are able to control your links,
then you will take a big step in steadily collecting your
commissions through the ebooks you've created or the links
posted in forums, boards, email messages, etc….

For the examples that follow, ClickBank(TM) is used as the
affiliate program. If you do not know how ClickBank works,
read my article, 'ClickBank Tutorial - an abstract' at
http://eZine4Profit.com

ClickBank is the only payment system that allows you to
offer an affiliate system to your website visitors without
many requirements either by you, the affiliate owner, or by
the users, your promising affiliates. All that is needed is
a ClickBank nickname. The merchant uses his/her nickname
to sell his/her products and services; the affiliate uses
his/her nickname to promote the merchant's products or
services and to get commissions each time a sale is
generated through his/her affiliate link.

You can get a ClickBank nickname here:
http://url4profit.com/to.cgi?id=admin&pid=43

If your ClickBank account is 'soft4pro,' then your
affiliate link for promoting -say- Michael Rasmussen's
'Ezine Marketing Magic - How To Start YOUR OWN Successful
Online Newsletter or Ezine' would be:

http://hop.clickbank.net/?soft4pro/ezmagic

As you can see, Michael uses ClickBank for his affiliate
program. ClickBank pays his affiliates so this is an easy
way to offer an affiliate program.

Now, suppose Michael decides - for his reasons - to stop
using ClickBank as his payment system.
This way, he also stops offering the affiliate program
through ClickBank. And let's say that the new affiliate
link for Michael's ebook was something like this:

http://michaelserver.com/?youraffiliateID

Since the hop-link
http://hop.clickbank.net/?soft4pro/ezmagic will stop
working, the bad affiliate can't get any more commissions
from Michael's best seller. Even if 10,000 people use the
ebook, a bad link is still a dead link….

The good affiliate though, did NOT use the assigned
hoplink, http://hop.clickbank.net/?soft4pro/ezmagic, to
promote Michael's ebook.

The good affiliate used this link instead:
http://turboreferer.com/r/ezmagic

Test it - click the links:
1. http://hop.clickbank.net/?soft4pro/ezmagic
2. http://turboreferer.com/r/ezmagic

They both display the same page - right?

How did the good affiliate perform his magic?

The good affiliate keeps a special folder on his website at
http://turboreferer.com - the folder 'r' - it could be
anything else like '3' or 'd,' but 'r' makes sense because
it stands for 'redirection.'

The good affiliate creates 1 sub-folder of that main
folder for each product/service he promotes;

For example:
- 'ezmagic' for Michael's best seller
- 'minisites' for Phil Wiley's ebook, 'Mini Site Secrets'
- and so on.

Whenever the good affiliate wants to include his affiliate
link for promoting Michael's ebook, he sends people to
http://turboreferer.com/r/ezmagic.

Whenever the good affiliate wants to include his affiliate
link for promoting Phil's ebook, he sends people to
http://url4profit.com/to.cgi?id=admin&pid=54

Now...

What's inside each sub-folder?

There is 1 file named index.html in each sub-folder and it
contains a META redirection tag. For your information, META
tags are not only used for the keywords and the description
of your site, but also for many other special functions. If
you remember my article on META tags, you know how they
work. You can download my article on META tags here:
http://eZine4Profit.com

The index.html file in each sub-folder contains the
following code - NOTE that I use the symbol { instead of <
and } instead of > so the code will be displayed on your
screen.

{html}
{head}
{title} Ezine Marketing Magic - How To Start YOUR OWN
Successful Online Newsletter or Ezine {/title}
{meta http-equiv="Refresh" Content="0;URL=http://hop.clickbank.net/?soft4pro/ezmagic"}
{/head}
{body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000" link="#0000ff"
vlink="#800080" alink="#ff0000"
oncontextmenu="return false"}
{a href="http://hop.clickbank.net/?soft4pro/ezmagic"
onmouseover="window.status='Click here'; return true"
onmouseout="window.status=''"}Ezine Marketing Magic - How
To Start YOUR OWN Successful Online Newsletter or Ezine
{/a}
{/body}
{/html}

You can use the code above to create your own index.html
files for your affiliate links. Just replace { with < and
} with >.

Some notes about the code:

This command

{meta http-equiv="Refresh" Content="0;
URL=http://hop.clickbank.net/?soft4pro/ezmagic"} redirects
users in 0 seconds (Content="0) to the
URL=http://hop.clickbank.net/?soft4pro/ezmagic.

The code used in the BODY tag

oncontextmenu="return false"

does not allow users to right-click your affiliate link
and copy-paste it so that they can change the link to their
affiliate links. You see, if, for example, a user with the
ClickBank nickname '1nternet' copies your affiliate link,
http://hop.clickbank.net/?soft4pro/ezmagic, he/she can
replace your nickname ('soft4pro' in this example) with
his/her nickname ('1nternet'), thereby resulting in this
affiliate link, http://hop.clickbank.net/?1nternet/ezmagic.
If he/she uses this new affiliate link, he/she will steal
the commission from you. Since Michael offers a 50%
commission on each sale you generate from your affiliate
link, the user that replaces your nickname with his/her
ClickBank nickname will get back 50% of the price paid for
Michael's ebook and he/she will collect the money from the
check sent by ClickBank - as he/she would if he/she were
promoting Michael's ebook as an affiliate.

Now note the LINK:

{a href="http://hop.clickbank.net/?soft4pro/ezmagic"
onmouseover="window.status='Click here'; return true"
onmouseout="window.status=''"}Ezine Marketing Magic - How
To Start YOUR OWN Successful Online Newsletter or Ezine
{/a}

The following code

onmouseover="window.status='Click here'; return true"
onmouseout="window.status=''"}

hides your affiliate link by preventing it from being
displayed in the STATUS BAR when the user places the mouse
over the link.

With these 2 simple methods: a) by disabling the right-
click on your screen and b) by not allowing the actual
link to be displayed in the Status Bar, you can easily
protect your affiliate link. Since the redirection to the
actual site will take place in 0 seconds, there is
virtually no time for the user to discover your affiliate
link and replace your nickname with his/her nickname
(a.k.a. steal your commission.)

Also note that the title of Michael's ebook has been used
both in the TITLE tag of the index.html file and also in
the LINK that goes to his site. This way, the page
index.html has a good chance to be recorded by the search
engines even if you DON'T manually submit this page to
them.

There are far better ways to cloak your affiliate link
inside that index.html file, but only the redirection
method is discussed here. What I'd suggest to you is to use
a TRACKER instead of the actual affiliate URL. A tracker is
a URL assigned by a cgi script installed on your server or
by a remote service, which hides your actual URL by
displaying the URL of the cgi script plus a unique ID for
the link you have specified, which also counts how many
times your link is clicked. For the purposes of the
example in this article, I created this tracker:

http://turboreferer.com/cgi-bin/track/tracker.cgi?ezmagic

Click the tracker and you'll be directed to Michael's
site. What the tracker does is redirect the user to
http://hop.clickbank.net/?soft4pro/ezmagic - that's how I
defined it through the cgi script's administration menu.

Since a tracker counts how many times the specific link is
clicked, and you can count the orders received by your
specific affiliate link, you'll be able to know the
CONVERSION RATIO for the product you promote through that
affiliate link. I am sure you have heard of this term
before - now you know what it means too. If a link has 100
clicks and 10 people have ordered the product through your
link, then the conversion ration for that product is
100:10=10%.

So, if you can install cgi scripts, then use a tracker for
your affiliate links; if not, then use the META redirection
method described in this article.

Using the methods described above, the good affiliate does
not care if a product's owner changes his/her affiliate
system. Since the good affiliate uses links residing on
his/her server, the only thing he'll/she'll need to do is
replace the old links inside the sub-folders with his/her
new affiliate links.

As you can understand, assuring that your affiliate links
give YOU, and NOT SOMEONE ELSE, credit for sales will
increase your commissions.

However, what the good affiliate also does is promote
his/her affiliate links in such a way as to increase
his/her mailing list with prospective customers, so even if
a user who clicks his/her links does NOT order the
product, he/she will still become a subscriber to his/her
newsletter, ezine, or special list. I'll tell you how to
do this in the next issue.