Protecting Your Affiliate Income

Becoming an affiliate is one of the best ways to earn a steady income online. If you don’t want to have your own website you don’t have to – there are plenty of ways to promote your affiliate products and drive enough traffic to them without needing to shell out any money to get started.

Whenever you start promoting a new product you will receive a link that is unique to you to start promoting it with. This will generally be the main URL of the website plus your affiliate link attached to the end.

Many affiliates promote this exact link to their customers, if they send it out via a newsletter or email. Unfortunately if you are doing this you could be losing out on some of your affiliate earnings.

The problem is that some people online have a natural aversion to the thought of someone else making a profit off their purchase. Why this should make a difference is anyone’s guess; after all as long as they receive what they ordered at the price they were quoted and they are happy with the purchase, there really shouldn’t be a problem.

However it’s a fact of life that some people will see your affiliate link and take that portion away from the URL, enabling them to go directly to the site you recommended. All of which means you don’t get anything from the subsequent sale.

If this happens a lot it can make a serious dent in your income, so it’s obvious you need to plug the gap in some way. The perfect way to do this is to use a link cloaking service. There are plenty of these online that offer their services for free, and it only takes a minute or two to get a cloaked link to replace your standard affiliate ones.

This will prevent people from taking out your affiliate link and going directly to the site, as the link is unable to be tampered with. For a free service, this kind of preventative measure is worth its weight in gold.

This link can then be used in emails, on your website if you have one, and even in your blog – and there is no way that anyone can cheat you out of your income.

The only downside of this technique is that if you don’t currently cloak your links and you promote a lot of products and services, it might take you a couple of hours (or more, depending on the number you have to do) to convert them all. But when you compare that to the amount of money you’ll be leaving on the table if you don’t, that should be motivation enough to get started.

One final point – make sure you keep a database of all your products, the original affiliate links and the cloaked links. That way you’ll always be able to refer back to your list should you need to double check any information, without having to refer back to your affiliate site.

Sean Rasmussen is an Internet Marketer and creator of the Wealth Affiliate Websites. You can read about internet business and affiliate marketing at wealthcreationaffiliate.com/internetmarketing/