Clocking Affiliate Links and Cookie Stuffing
I mentioned a few days ago that there are unethical affiliate out there who stuff multiple cookies on your computers (essentially shoot in the dark) to get commissions as a result of you visiting the sites of merchants such as Amazon and eBay. What these guys do is basically using IFRAMES or Javascript to load cookies on your readers’ computers and emulate the action of clicking on affiliate links. I decided to not mention any specific method of doing that as the information can be used in the wrong way. Besides, you don’t want to get in trouble as Digital Point did a few days ago with eBay.
But the concept of embedded links is often accepted by affiliate networks. Let’s say you write a piece about a product on X.com, and you put your heart and soul in reviewing that item. However, X.com may not offer you the direct affiliate link for that product. There is a good chance that your readers can pick up the product without you getting the commission. Affiliate Cloner and similar solutions allow you to embed links on your sales pages in order for you to get the credit you deserve after putting your time and effort to write a review for that specific product.
Now you can use Affiliate Cloner the right way or the wrong way. There are many coupon sites that just load specific cookies on each page for the merchants they have agreements with but forget to actually promote the merchants’ products. Using Affiliate Cloner to put a merchant’s cookie on your visitors’ machines without actually promoting the merchant is unethical in my opinion. But cloaking your links and making sure that you get credit for your hard work is more than fair to me. You may want to check with affiliate networks to see if they allow embedded links (I know CJ doesn’t), but fair merchants are fine with you promoting a product and getting credit for your work. And if you find merchants which are not fine with your approach, maybe you shouldn’t promote their products.
I have tried GoTryThis as well. That is a good piece of software but currently unavailable.
[...] avoid clicking on links that look suspicious, and that thing up there darn sure looks suspicious. Cloaking affiliate links is not very hard, so why leave anything to [...]