Using Affiliate Links On Squidoo
One of the things that Seth Godin has made very clear is that he actively promotes the use of Squidoo for Affiliate Marketing. As long as you are providing meaningful, useful and complete information on your Squidoo Lens then there is no problem with then linking to an affiliate product which compliments or further develops the information you have provided. Or you can link to a product which relates to the content you have provided. So for example if you have written about using natural products then you could be looking at providing an affiliate link to related products.
There is a problem though! It’s something which a number of Squidoo Lensmasters have been talking about of late and that is people seeing your affiliate link and changing it!
Let’s look at the problem in a little more detail.
After an affiliate marketer chooses a product to promote, they are given a unique website link called an “affiliate link”. In this link, the unique identity of an affiliate marketer is attached. Whenever a visitor clicks on an affiliate link to go to the merchant’s website and make a purchase, the affiliate is credited.
This means that if someone looks at your affiliate link and removes your affiliate id from that link and then uses it to purchase products, you will not be credited. The reason is that merchant will not be able to know which affiliate had sent this buyer. The only way to get credited is to have the complete affiliate link.
Usually the affiliate link is in this form:
http://www.anymerchantwebsite.com?aff_id=someidlike123
In this URL there are two parts:
a) http://www.anymerchantwebsite.com
It is the link to the merchant website.
b) aff_id = someidlike123
It is the unique affiliate id of the affiliate marketer.
Risk
You can see in the above example that it is really very easy to remove the trailing affiliate id from the affiliate link. Anyone can remove your affiliate id and visit the merchant website to purchase. When this happens, you lose the commission that was rightfully yours. This is a problem for the affiliate marketer.
How to Resolve This Issue?
Well there are a number of things you can do.
You could create a free link at TinyUrl which allows you to mask/hide the affiliate link. The major problem there is that you are not able to track how many people you have referred to the merchant’s site. There’s a similar problem with using various other free services and you may therefore want to have a look at something like the Link Cloaker which enables you to set it all up on a domain of your own and then track how many times the link has been clicked.
It’s really down to you but there is increasing evidence that people are changing affiliate links to avoid giving the affiliate the credit for the sale. Even worse they are changing them to give themselves a credit for the sale!
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