Posts Tagged ‘Affiliate Commissions’

Affiliate Commissions

January 8th, 2010

Your affiliate commissions are your earnings. Each sale you make for your sponsor will earn a percentage of the sale. This will be your commission. In order to make your affiliate business grow you will need to be sure you earn a decent commission from every affiliate program you join.

Safeguarding your commission: it is important to know how to safeguard your commission. You can do this in several ways.

Checking out the companies:

It is critical to your success that you check out the company that you are proposing to join. Be sure they are reliable and are an established business. You do not want the company to fold before you can get paid your commissions. Also you do not want to work for unreliable unscrupulous companies.

Cloaking your affiliate link: There are many people who wil literally steal your sales commission from you. They will either cut out your code from the link and buy direct from the company or replace your code with theirs. Either way you lose your commission. In order to prevent this you will need to use software to disguise the link or have a link that redirects your visitor to the sponsor’s sales page.

Checking that your links work: This is something that many affiliates forget to do. It is no good sending traffic to a broken link. There can be a number of reasons for broken links. Sometimes it is temporary other times it is permanent. If you find your link to your sponsor’s site is not working it is very likely one of 2 things. Your sponsor may be having some web site issues, which will be temporary, or if you are using a redirect service for that link, it may have broken and you will have to remake it or use another company.

I have found this site very useful.  You will learn the real secrets from a super affiliate who has been making a nice living from affiliate programs for several years.  To learn more about taking care of your commissions www.secretaffiliatescout.com

About Affiliate Link Cloakers

November 3rd, 2009

Online affiliate programs are an important and integral part of ebusiness – online marketing, if you prefer.There are online affiliate programs of every kind, size, budget and description. And more than likely, you too will join an affiliate marketing network or at the very least join an affiliate program or two. 

You have to figure there is a marketing affiliate program with a high commission that will be of interest to you. Only, just watch out for the internet sharks!  When it comes to Affiliate Programs, You are swiming, as it were, in shark-infested waters!

But first, a question – two actually -When you fill your gas tank do you leave the tank lid open and then put your gas cap in the glove compartment?Hopefully not.Second, do you work for free?Again, hopefully not.Well, the fact of the matter is that if you plan to join an affiliate program, or any program with the intention of making money on the internet, your first step Must Be to set up an affiliate link cloaker to help you protect your commissions. Otherwise you will, in effect, be leaving off your gas cap and you will wind up working for nothing or at the very least, far less than you are entitled.  And keep in mind, there are some Very High Commission affiliate programs out there!  If you are interested in the info email me.

Bottom line, commissions to which you are entitled will either be subverted (ie. a buyer of the product will see your affiliate link ID and wipe it out) or (make that and/or) a full time thief will hijack your earned commissions and make them his or her own.But never once do they remember it is you who paid for that PPC (Pay per click advertising) that led them thru you to the product!Trust me on this: it happened to me; it can (and if you leave bare affiliate links) so quite likely will happen to you.In my case it was strictly by co-incidence that I was in touch with others in the same program and we began to compare notes and facts, and realized we were systematically being robbed of our commissions.And Here Is The Lesson For You: I contacted the FBI Internet Fraud Division, the FTC, the processor of the commissions and the webmaster.The FBI said gee, thanks for the info, we will add it to our growing database …The FTC said gee, thanks for the info, we will add it to our growing database, and here is some info on internet theft, and if we get enough complaints about this particular thief, some day we may actually go after him!  Thanks again.The processor said Gee, thanks for the info, but what do you want us to do about it.?And the webmaster said … nothing.  I never heard back!

THE ULTIMATE LESSON: YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN.

Like the referee says to the boxers before Round 1: …Protect Yourself At All Times!The good news is, now you are informed and to be forwarned is to be forearmed.The bad news is that when it comes to affiliate link cloakers, you had better know ahead of time what you are getting into, and how to use the tools needed to get the cloaker going.You need to know about FTP, PHP, creating a webpage from scratch, Domains, URL’s, uploading, hosting services, and webpages … oh yes, WARNING/NOTICE: If you use GoDaddy for your domain you CAN NOT use the Website Tonight feature for creating a cloaking domain.Took me two days to find this out.  I kept trying to upload an FTP program and it never would.  I only got Error Messages.  Finally, I called directly to the GoDaddy phone customer service and was informed that I needed to create a new domain and use their hosting service method because the ‘Website Tonight’ feature does not upload. This applies to any service – you need full hosting service.So I bought another domain, used the full hosting service instead of the Website Tonight service, and I was totally inept at creating an uploading website for my cloaker.I kept writing the seller – I could see their PHP file, but I could not get that file to open. They kept sending me emails, etc. offering suggestions, but I never could get it to work.  I got my money back and suggested they modernize their program to provide more than just a ZIP file.Could they not also provide an extractor and a program installer??  Hey, when was the last time you bought a program from any internet marketing company that did not Unzip and Install the program???OK, I went to another cloaking program selling affiliate software.  Same deal.  They say it is so simple … just do this. Then do that.  Then simply add this … Right.  A week later, another wasted week and another request for a refund because I could not get their link cloaker, URL cloaker if you perfer, to work for me.  Maybe YOU can get it to install and work poroperly but I could not.  I had another program cloaker come with SIX pages (in small type) ofinstructions!  Heaven help me.

FINALLY, I got lucky.  A webmaster that appreciates the problem of a non-guru who just wants to get those links protected without having to be a master programmer!  If you want them to, they will have a programmer set the cloaker up for you and provide you with a websitehosting service that has the needed protocols, etc.  Would I like them to set the whole thing up for me?  WOULD I!Thank goodness I found you!  Heck yes.  So for a mere $30 extra I had the cloaking program set up professionally,   PLUS I got three months of hosting free.  No more frustrating hours and days messing with this stuff’.  Thirty bucks … its a bargain!  Not to mention three free month’s of hosting service.  Heck of a deal.   And there is a video to introduce you to using the cloaking setup.  Now, Finally, it really is easy.  Literally 45 seconds to one minute!  it was easy!  Just type in two lines:  The affiliate link and the ‘name’ identifier of the product such as ‘Dogfood’ or ‘Candlemaking’ etc.I love it, they did the grunt work, it takes me a minute or less to do the set up! 

OK, you read thru a lot to get to the program, but you need to be aware of the pitfalls and dangers of not cloaking and going over your head so to speak, unless you are a master at this stuff.In either case, take it from me, unless you really know what you are doing, ask the professional to set everything up and do it without the frustration and aggravation of going it alone.  By the way the set-up option is available after you sign up for the program.  For more information feel free to visit: http://www.DontStealFromMe.info

P.S.  As a thank you for visiting the review and staying with it (and to see the link protection in action) visit http://CoolInternetProducts.com/presents/EbooksPlus  and keep your eye on the website URL and how it stays at this designation.  Feel free to take advantage of the Ten Free Ebooks available for your visit.  Finally, notice the identifing word ‘EbookPlus’ in the website address; that’s all I had to type on one of the two lines to create my protected affiliate link. Easy!

Safeguarding Your Affiliate Link

October 29th, 2009

Your affiliate link is the link your sponsor gives to you when you join the program. It is very important as this is how your sales and commissions will be tracked. It is usually your sponsor’s URL with a code name or number at the end. This code is how your sponsor’s affiliate software or program will track your traffic and ultimately the sales that you send to them.

There is something that you should be aware of regarding this link and that is affiliate hijacking. This is a common problem with affiliates. Surprisingly enough many people just ignore this and allow a lot of money to be left on the table.

What is affiliate hijacking? This is when unscrupulous affiliates substitute your code with their own. It can also happen when customers knowingly or unknowingly chop off your affiliate code and go directly to your sponsor’s site. Without the affiliate code that is in your link your sponsor has no idea that you have sent the customer to them and cannot award your commission. This is very common with Clickbank affiliate links.

Many times sponsors will track your visitors with cookies but customers will often clear cookies from their cache and your commission can be lost. Therefore it is most important that potential customers use your own special affiliate link when they buy as a result of your promotions.

This problem can be easily resolved by disguising or cloaking your affiliate link. Here are a couple of ways that you can do this.

Cloaking your Affiliate link:

Some affiliate programs do not allow you to cloak your affiliate links so be careful to read the TOS of each program you join, but most of them do allow this.

In order to get maximum profits from your affiliate programs it is important not to ignore affiliate hijacking. With these simple and cost effective techniques you can fight back. It is true that some hijackers will get through no matter what but if you take precautions you will safeguard most of your sales and get the money that is rightfully yours.

Affiliate marketing has some techniques which you should master before you start. In order to learn more about affiliate marketing why not learn from the experts. To find out more please go to www.secretaffiliatescout.com