By: Frank Bauer
Are you aware that using certain tools to protect your affiliate commissions might in fact cause you to loose them?
Let me explain you how than can be and what you can do to protect yourself from commission loss...
The other day a good marketing friend of mine, let's call her Eva, send me an email, telling me about a service that she believed me to be interested in... and in fact, I was.
She wrote: "If you want to take a look, the link is: http://www.more4you.ws/mon"
When I followed her URL, I noticed on that page, that her affiliate ID was missing on the main page, as well as on the order form page.
Since I wanted her to get credit for this, I emailed Eva:
"Your link will not earn you commissions as your affiliate ID doesn't show at http://www.monopolizer.com/.
I recommend to use a forwarding link instead of placing the site into a frame."
She answered me that it worked fine when she followed the link herself. How was that possible you ask? Very simple.
When she originally got the affiliate link, she must have used the link one time directly and this way saved the cookie on her computer.
So I replied to Eva:
"I checked it again... if I visit their site through http://www.more4you.ws/mon, your ID is not shown anywhere.
But if I visit it through http://www.monopolizer.com/index.php?affiliateID=249040817 I can see your ID everywhere.
In general... cookie based systems often have a problem if you place the site into a HTML frame on another domain."
This time Eva replied to me:
"Well that's got me stumped... I used Covert Affiliate to generate that URL and I just cleared my cookies and tried it and I do not see my affiliate codes on the main page..."
I actually noticed that problem of promoting through a frame already quiet a while ago. Also e.g. when I use Mike's MyViralWebsite system or any other system that displays your affiliate URL inside a HTML frame... it's the same problem.
The tricky part about it... some programs work if called through a frame (meaning: your affiliate ID will be used) and others don't.
My rule of thumb is: If I don't see my affiliate ID on the other page, I will not use a HTML frame.
But for the reason I described before, make sure that you delete you cookies before you give it a try!
This is also the reason why I always use my own Add2it Go-To Pro tracking links whenever I promote another program.
The Add2it Go-To Pro links look e.g. like this:
http://www.add2it.com/go/to.pl?l=ListDotCom
To make that shorter and easier, I created and uploaded another tiny script called see.pl. Now I can use an even shorter link:
http://add2it.com/see.pl?ListDotCom
The last part, the "ListDotCom", is what changes depending on what program I want to promote.
The advantage... not only do you get stats on how many people click that link every month, it also simply forwards to the URL you want to promote, prevents this way the "frame" problem while still hiding the ugly long affiliate link and this way it REALLY protects your commission.
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This article was posted on October 04, 2004
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