How to Prevent Commission Theft

February 17, 2008 | Filed Under Affiliate Income, Internet Marketing

If you are promoting products through affiliate links, then chances are you are losing some of your commissions to affiliate link hijackers.

Many affiliate marketers do not take commission theft seriously, they think that it’s a myth or that it might be real but that it doesn’t affect them. The sad truth of the matter is that commission theft is real and is becoming more and more common.

For those of you who do not know commission theft is when another affiliate replaces your affiliate ID with their own prior to clicking on the link. In other words they are basically robbing you of your rightful commissions and giving themselves a discount on the product you were promoting.

The other type of theft that might occur, comes from consumers who think they will have to pay more for the product by clicking on your affiliate link. This is true, I have actually spoken with consumers who feel this way. The way they get around your links, is by either retyping the websites main URL or by copying and pasting the main URL into a new browser window.

For example, if my affiliate link looks like this:
sample.com/index.php?12345

Then the consumer will retype sample.com into a new browser window, thereby bypassing your affiliate link and cheating you out of your commission.

Now that you’ve seen how your commissions can be hijacked, you’re probably wondering how you can protect yourself from this kind of thing. Below you will find three different ways you can protect your links from hijackers.

The first method is to add an ‘onmouseover’ script to your affiliate links, this causes text of your choosing to be displayed in the status bar when the cursor is placed over your link.

With this method, when someone moves the cursor over the link, the status bar displays “Affiliate Mastermind” instead of my affiliate link. This is only partially effective; however, as your affiliate link can still be seen if they right click on the link.

The second method is to add a ‘Disable Right Click’ script to your web pages. Using this script will display a popup message telling them that right clicking is not allowed on this page.

This prevents right clicking on your webpage and when used in conjunction with the ‘onmouseover’ script can be fairly effective in protecting your links from hijackers. Although if the hijacker is determined he or she can still go to View Source and see your webpage’s source code and they can dig out your affiliate link that way.

The third and by far the most effective way is to use some type of link cloaking software or redirect script. Link cloaking software takes your affiliate link and encrypts it in a HTML file that you can name anything you want. So, for example if my affiliate link looks like this:
http://

Then I use the link cloaker software and it creates a .html file which I name “getresponse”, and my new affiliate link will look like this:
YOURDOMAIN.com/getresponse.html

Link cloaker software not only protects your affiliate links, it also lets turn your long and complicated affiliate links into short professional links.

There are many different types of link cloaking software available and can cost anywhere from $30 to $200.

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