By Robert Smith ©2004 All Rights Reserved
You may be losing 20% or more of your total affiliate commissions and you have no way of knowing how much you are actually losing. Today I’ll show you how you can easily stop these losses by cloaking your affiliate URLs. In my case one single change boosted my affiliate sales income about 23%.
Commission theft happens most often today when your customers install programs with hidden applications that are secretly bundled inside other software you usually downloaded free on the Internet.
Many of these programs search for common affiliate URLs or domain names on your website, when they find an affiliate ID they replace your ID or URL for another. Your customer buys assuming you are getting the commission short-circuiting the sale and redirecting your commission to someone else.
This can also happen when someone substitutes another affiliate ID for yours in order to redirect your sales commission after you did all the work.
Clean Up Your Computer
You may unwillingly be part of the problem if you have any of these programs on your computer. I am very careful what I install on my computer; I have antivirus protection and a firewall yet I found several programs running on my own computer that I never knew I had installed.
There is an excellent free software program you may download named Ad-aware. It will scan your computer’s memory, registry and hard drives for known spyware and scumware and other programs and remove them according to your choices.
Ad-Aware Freeware
http://www.lavasoftusa.com/
Why Use URL Cloaking
Cloaking your URLs and email addresses will accomplish two things for you. First it will make it nearly impossible for most scumware programs and humans to redirect or even to read your affiliate links on your web pages, and second it will make all affiliate links appear as if the pages are actually located on your own website.
URL Cloaking 101
The easiest way to cloak affiliate URLs and email addresses that appear on your pages is to convert them into ASCII text decimal code so that most humans and software can’t read them while your browser still will read them correctly. I use a simple program that converts ASCII text to decimal code. You enter in a URL or email address and it outputs a cloaked version that is safer to use on your webpages.
Download Dascii.exe Free
http://www.smithfam.com/dascii.exe
Making Hidden Redirect Pages
A Hidden Redirect page is simply a normal HTML page that sends your customer to your affiliate page; this one has a special twist. This technique also blocks smart tags and uses a hidden frame to load your affiliate page so it appears that the affiliate page resides on your own website. Don’t worry I won’t make this too complex, I’ll give you some simple code you can paste into empty page using in any text editor (like notepad), save to a file and upload it to your server.Here Is How To Set It Up FIRST: Use the ASCII to decimal program you downloaded above to cloak your Affiliate URL. Keep the program open you will need the decimal version of your affiliate URL again in step two. SECOND: Create a new page in any simple text editor (notepad.exe).
In order to make your page appear blank to humans paste the following code at the very top line of your page. Don’t worry it won’t show up on your page.
<!– Sorry This Page Is Not Visible –>
Next from the top of the page hit return about 50 times, this will put you well down on the page so when you paste the following code on your page it will not be visible to anyone looking at the source code of your page.
Replace ( XXXXXX ) below with the cloaked URL for your affiliate program.<html><title></title><meta name=”mssmarttagspreventparsing” content=”true”><meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”></head><frameset border=0 rows=”100%,*” frameborder=”no” margintop=0 marginleft=0 marginright=0 marginbottom=0><frame SRC=”XXXXXX” scrolling=auto frameborder=”no” border=0 noresize><frame topmargin=”0″ marginwidth=0 scrolling=no marginheight=0 frameborder=”no” border=0 noresize> <body></body></frameset></html>
Save your file with .htm, or html last name for example “myoppurl.html” and upload it to your server where your other pages are stored. See the URL below for an example from my website. If you view the source of the page and scroll down you can see the actual source code like our example.
http://www.smithfam.com/ts.html
Now, whenever anyone clicks on the URL your affiliate link will take the visitor to your affiliate page but they will see your web page URL in the browser’s address window.
You can use the redirect page URL as you would any link in your email and on your website. It is not 100% tamperproof but it should reduce your affiliate commission theft at least 95%.
ROBERT SMITH helps thousands successfully market their Internet based home business. You’ll find tons of free marketing tools & resources on his Internet Marketing web site at: http://www.smithfam.com/.
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