Affiliate Link Hijacking:

A method of depriving an affiliate of the commission which should be rightfully his. This can happen in two ways every time the full affiliate link (see above for an example) is displayed in the affiliate’s promotion:

• The first way is by bypassing the full link, a lighter form of hijacking. Instead of just clicking on the link someone types the URL in the address field of his browser by hand and chops off the link ending which contains the affiliate’s ID. This is done either unknowingly or wilfully because this person cannot stand the idea of another earning money. The sales page’s tracking system has no chance to connect the visitor to the affiliate then. Actual tests show that something like this happens in about 30% of the cases.

• The second way would be an actual hijack. Instead of just chopping off the affiliate-ID-part of the link someone replaces it with his own ID. He just need to sign up as an affiliate for this product first which is a matter of minutes in most cases. As a result the affiliate is robbed of his commission and the customer receives an undeserved discount. Some merchants forbid affiliates buying from their own links but by far not all.

According to tests affiliate earnings are about 30% less than they would be if every sale via his link would be registered correctly.

Of course there is a solution to this problem which is called link cloaking. That is, to disguise the link so it doesn’t look like an affiliate link anymore.

There are free services like www.tinyurl.com or www.graburl.com which enable affiliates to enter their full affiliate URL like the sample link http://www.productname.com/?affiliate=12345 and get it replaced by an URL like http://tinyurl.com/xyz or http://graburl.com/xyz where “xyz” stands for a unique code redirecting it to your affiliate URL via the tinyurl or graburl servers.

You can now promote your “replacement link” and profit from two advantages:

• It considerably shortens your affiliate link and thereby increases the possibility that someone will click on it (there are much longer and uglier affiliate links than the above sample link and it is proven that people don’t like to click on them. The longer the less clicks)

• There is no possibility to bypass you as an affiliate and steal your commission as the sales page URL is not displayed.

Another possibility to cloak your link is by use of a link-cloaking software. Supposed you own a domain such a program can change your affiliate URL into www.yourdomain.com/recommends/product_abc .

This link has the same advantages as the redirect URLs from tinyurl or graburl but one great additional advantage which can make you a lot more money:

One can see from the link text already that someone is recommending a product here. People like to click on things which make sense to them. In contrast to this a link like http://tinyurl.com/xyz is more “clickfriendly” than a long and ugly affiliate link but is still incomprehensible and therefore will not generate as much clicks Case studies revealed that the “recommend-link” can increase Click-Through-Rates up to 900% compared to incomprehensible or ugly links.

[Affiliate comes from Latin affiliare = to be connected;

Link comes from Old Danish lænkia = chain;

Hijacking comes from high(way) jacker = one who holds up]

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