Affiliate Hide and Seek

If you’ve read my previous two posts, Passive Income Here I Come and Those Little Things That Make You Happy, you probably noticed that I’ve started promoting this new cool free SEO eBook by using an affiliate link. You could also notice that the actual affiliate link is hidden.

Some of you must wonder why did I do that, so I’m dedicating this post to affiliate links and why it is a good idea to hide them. A how-to on hiding links will follow in my next article.

Why is it a good idea to hide an affiliate link?

1. To Stop Loosing Money

Two things happen that cause you to loose money:

1. Hijacking the link – There are “good people” out there that would hijack your link. They would change the the user-id in the link to theirs in order earn the affiliate commission themselves.
2. Bypassing the link – Another good bunch of people would remove the user-id altogether, leaving only the merchant’s url. This way no one makes money except the merchant.

I don’t know exactly what percentage of people do this, but I heared rumors that about 25%-35% of affiliate links get hijacked.

2. Branding

You want to promote your brand as much as possible, and a link with your domain will do its bit of help when you use it on forums, article directories, your own posts, etc.

3. Aestethics

Most affiliate links look awful. Consider the difference:

http://www.nothingtodowithyourbranddomainname.com/d/app/user_id=123456

and:

http://www.yoursite.com/product

Conclusion

So, we have there plenty of good reasons to hide your affiliate links. I don’t see any reasons not to do this so far, although, I think that despite hiding the link itself, sometimes it’s a good idea to give your reader a heads-up that it is an affiliate link. I’m currently doing it mainly to test the nuts and bolts of the way I’m hiding it.

Stick around for my next post to go through the how-to, and an overview of which other ways are there to do it. This is a good time to subscribe to my RSS, by the way…

- Alex

[tags]affiliate links, link hijacking, branding, hiding affiliate links[/tags]