How I can Unhide your Hidden Affiliate Links…
January 19, 2009No Comments
Hiding your affiliate links? That’s what experts tell you, right? After all, you wouldn’t want folks like me to hijack your commission. In truth, there are multiple ways to hijack others commission, which I find unethical and just plain wrong. But there are affiliate out there who wouldn’t feel an ounce for you and your business and go on to take your money anyway. Believe it or not, hiding links is more than just protecting your commission checks. You also want to protect your market as much as possible.
A lot of affiliates use Clickbank products to make a living. But if you leave Clickbank links on your pages, anybody who has an IQ of 10 or more can grab your link, insert their own username, and start a campaign on a product that you have done considerable amount of research to find. I don’t know about you, but I put a lot of time to find products that convert well. For me to come out and tell you what works is like saying that I am not interested in paying my mortgage anymore.
Leaving your affiliate username for others to find can lead them to your other campaigns as well. Let’s say you are promoting 10 Clickbank products, and you are not hiding your links at all. You are basically telling others that it’s OK for them to figure out what exactly you are promoting. And let’s not forget that you can be slapped by Google if you have too many “naked affiliate links” on your website.
Even if you use link masking products to hide your links, I can still gather competitive intelligence info on you and your business. Some link masking solutions leave the word “affiliate” in the URL. Not very smart, right? But not too many folks bother to check the details before paying up for these solutions.
In all my years of being involved in the affiliate marketing business, I can only recall a handful of times that I have failed to identify an affiliate link from just a normal redirect. If you use TinyURL or BudURL, you are going to make my job a bit harder, but I’ll still find what you are doing. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make it hard for me.
Your Thoughts: what’s your favorite link masking solution?
