Affiliate Marketing is a great business to be in as there is a very low set up cost and the sky is the limit on potential earnings. However being involved in affiliate marketing you will naturally have many affiliate links that you will need to ‘hide.’
Why hide or cloak your affiliate marketing links?
Studies have shown that as a nation, we simply don’t like others making money off our backs! It’s silly really as the internet marketer has brought your attention to something that is needed for your business growth.
What does the majority of your visitors do? They simply remove your links to the product and purchase the item direct or if they are greedy will change the link to their own affiliate link. Therefore concealing your affiliate link is necessary in order to protect your commissions.
However when you conceal your affiliate link, otherwise known as cloaking the possibility is there for you to lose commissions. Over 50 percent of affiliate commissions are lost due to unsafe cloaking of affiliate links.
This is a staggering statistic isn’t it? Most affiliate programs use cookies in order to determine which affiliate is paid commission for referring the buyer. Cookies are small amounts of data that are stored on a visitor’s computer. This is common knowledge that most affiliate marketers are fully aware of.
However, what most are not aware of is that there are two types of cookie, the standard cookie and a validated cookie. A Validated Cookie is one with which a Compact Privacy Policy is sent at the same time as the cookie. This policy, confirms that the cookie will not be used to invade the privacy of the visitor.
Therefore the type of browser that is used by your visitor is critical on whether you get paid commissions or not! Internet Explorer is currently the only browser that differentiates between Validated Cookies and Standard Cookies. IE is also by far the most commonly used browser therefore this difference affects a lot of potential customers.
Internet Explorer will discard Standard web cookies, i.e. non-validated cookies, unless they come from the identical website as shown in the IE address bar. The visitor may over-ride this feature by setting their IE privacy to accept all cookies, however how many of us know how to do this and why would we want to? The consequences of this are that we, as affiliate marketers stand to lose out in a lot of commissions depending on how we cloak our affiliate links.
Firefox and most other browsers allow the user to configure the browsers to reject third party cookies. This therefore will also lose you a small percentage of commission. However, when safe links are cloaked correctly then the benefits far outweigh the losses. The Solution? Using simple redirects is by far the best solution for securing your online affiliate commissions.
There are several types of simple redirects; these include PHP redirects, Meta tag redirects and JavaScript redirects. It is essential that as an affiliate marketer that you check your links often. If you are unsure of the type of link you are using, simply put it uncloaked, into your web browser and note the web address that shows. Next enter your cloaked link and if the address bar is different then you are link cloaking.
If the address remains the same then you are most likely using a Simple Redirect.
If you would like to check your links, please feel free to visit my link checker. It will tell you whether your affiliate links are safe or not. http://shhenterprises.com/linkcheck/
Don’t lose sales due to unsafe affiliate links! Be vigilant.
