Clickbank Link thieves

Regarding Clickbank links. If someone truly wants a product, they can go to Clickbank, search the product and buy from their own affiliate link. Is this ethical? No. Does it happen, Yes?

Other internet marketers may do this to you, but the general public typically is not aware of affiliate links and "stealing" commissions. They just purchase the product you are promoting if they are interested. If you are promoting internet marketing related products, this may happen to you more frequently than you want.

I use "Pretty Links" through my wordpress site, and the links are clean and not unprofessional like the clickbank cloaked url, or a tiny url. Pretty links is a free plugin for wordpress. Pretty links do not look like a aff link: Example of pretty link. http://yourwebsite.com/offer and when it goes to the product you will not see the hop=xxxxx in the browser either.

Hope this helps

This is solid information to sure, thanks.

Hey,

Ye, this is something that confused me for ages. I would visit a site and see an offer, and always wonder how the site owner would be able to make it appear as though it were his product.

Basically, the way you do it is by hosting the offer in a frame. This frame would be saved as index.htm and placed into a folder (which name you choose) in your public_html folder. If you wanted to see the offer you would type nameofyoursite.com/yourfolder and you would see the offer, which would appear to be hosted in your site.


A really cool product that does this for you is Affiliate Link Cloaker - Ninja Link Cloaker

Don't sweat it too much though, outside of the IM niche most people have no idea how hoplinks work.

Commission theft is a complicated topic. It basically is you pre-sell the product and they end up buying it through another affiliate or directly from the product website with your affiliate link. You get no commission even though this person probably never would have heard of the product without your pre-selling efforts.

This is complicated and there are a lot of reasons for it:

1. Someone is in research mode - they follow your hoplink but keep researching the product for a few more days and come across another affiliate promoting it and buy through there.

2. You pre-sell the product and they opt-in to the vendor's email list and buy it through the vendor's email campaign.

3. Someone has stuffed a cookie in the blog section of your comments (this is possible on a Squidoo lens & some other web platforms).

Using a cloaked URL doesn't really stop any of this. A cloaked URL actually converts better and has better click through rates. It's easier on the eyes so people are more willing to click it & trust it. Split testing has shown this over and over again.

A cloaked URL also can help your website in other ways - DMOZ is more likely to accept your site if it doesn't appear to have affiliate links, AdWords will go easier on you during a PPC campaign if you're not stuffed with affiliate links also.

There are countless niches where customers probably don't even know what "affiliate" means or "commission"...let alone that they would know what an affiliate link is or how to manipulate it.

The "problem" is really only limited to the IM niche, IMers buying from other IMers. I don't worry about this selling acne remedies or hair loss treatments. Really.

You should also always sign up for a vendors email's too. I never market for vendor's that put affiliate links in their emails. Thankfully there are plenty of non-sneaky vendors that just have blank links so you still get the commission...assuming it's within 30 days of course