How To Stop Affiliate Link Hijacking

Last week I went over my sales statistics for one of my profitable affiliate marketing campaigns and was stunned to discover my conversion rate had fallen to under 4%. Upon learning the results I was a little irritated because the sales funnel for this particular campaign had been tested and demonstrated conversions at over 38%. The faux pas made was thinking this was a small glitch that would correct itself shortly but a week passed and still no increase in my conversion rate. The conversion rate continued to remain under 4% for some unknown reason. The sales funnel was examined to see what had caused this crisis and then to find a solution. It was a mystery for me to see a high converting affiliate offer quickly take a plunge without any obvious reasons as to why it occurred. I then sought help from an Internet marketing buddy and asked him, how could this have happened? He reviewed my statistics and with a smile said, "Its apparent why your sales have fallen, your affiliate link got hijacked!" He asked me, "Are you doing anything to cloak your links?" My answer to his question was a big-fat NO.

Cloak an affiliate link I thought, what the heck is that? The thought had never entered my head that my links were being hijacked. I had no idea how to go about cloaking my own affiliate links within my campaigns. My buddy then proceeded to give me the reasons why I have to protect my links. This information enlightened me about the financial risk each of my campaigns was in due to link hijacking. There are people and programs out there that will steal your commissions by changing your affiliate links. In addition, there is a software program that can automatically replace your link whether from an advertisement or website and substitute your own referrer ID to the hijacker's ID. It hit me like a bolt of lightning, all the work I had put into creating a sales funnel for each campaign was at risk because of link hijacking. A full weekýs worth of revenue was already in jeopardy because of this. Itýs as though thieves were picking my pockets clean and I was unaware for a while a crime had been committed until my buddy gave me the facts.

Again, if your sales funnel has been tested and proven to convert and later you notice a severe decline in conversions then you are most likely the victim of commission thieves. There is loads of information on the Internet about link cloaking, some good and some bad. Some of these recommended solutions do not take affiliate marketing into account. (FYI) Please note there are different ways to cloak an affiliate link. The bad ones on the market will most often break the tracking cookie and others may mess up a redirect. Don't expect to sell anything with a faulty link cloaker.

The good news is with the right link cloaking software you can sabotage any attempt made by thieves to steal your commissions. By using a link cloaking software program produced by an experienced software company, you can plug this profit loosing leaky hole forever within a matter of a few minutes. There are lots of link cloaking software programs on the market. Simply do a search on your most popular search engine will bring up a list. Next, your important decision will be selecting the best one, which will work as advertised. The link cloaker that works best is the one that gets you more sales.

In conclusion, you can construct the most brilliant sale funnel and test it all kinds of ways until you are blue-in-the-face but it won't earn you a dime if commission thieves rob you blind. My advice for you is to close this unintended backdoor into your profits by installing a link cloaker as security for your overall online business strategy.

By: Wayne Hair

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Wayne Hairston has been a Webmaster and Internet Marketer since 1997. He has published several articles on the subject about Internet Marketing. Discover more about link cloaking in the free Cloak and Dagger Affiliate Secrets report. Feel free to distribute this article in any form as long as you include this resource box.