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.

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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.

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