The Importance of Building a List

Out of all the possible approaches to affiliate marketing, lead capture and list building represents the smartest and most effective option. Why?

A lost visitor is a lost sale. A lost visitor is the loss of potential repeat sales. Think of it this way: you’re putting time and money into your advertising. If you aren’t capturing your visitor’s email addresses, you’re basically throwing all of that traffic right down the drain.

When you capture your visitors to your list, you open a whole new world of profit opportunities – not just for the short term, but for the long term as well. The Benefits of List Marketing

You can educate your prospects. This will increase your conversion rate by giving you the opportunity to turn hesitant prospects into enthusiastic customers.

You can market to your prospects over and over again. Your long term profit potential exists in repeat sales. Never work for “just one sale”.

You can double your return on investment while lowering your advertising costs. Once you’ve got a list in place, you don’t have to limit your offerings to just affiliate product. You can bring in any additional, related products of interest to your list and make sales immediately without going through the same advertising process all over again. Can you see the benefits yet? Why spend money over and over again sending people to the same page and “hoping for a sale”, when you can capture them to your list and have full control over the conversion process?

Any other approach leaves you at the mercy of the merchant’s web copy and the customer’s mindset at first contact. You’ve got to lure your prospects in and expose them your message multiple times. This will save you so much time and money you’ll wonder why you ever did it any other way.

It'll also put you in the top 5% of affiliates that actually do this. . .

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Link Theft

Today we’re going to talk about the dark side of affiliate marketing: Link Theft. It’s not ethical, but it happens. You should know that there are people out there who, for whatever reason, absolutely hate the idea of someone earning a commission off their purchase. These are the cranky, paranoid customers of the online world. There are also fellow affiliate marketers who would deny you your hard earned commission as well.

The term “link theft” isn’t entirely accurate, though it’s what you’ll see used to refer to this phenomenon. The accurate term, in a nuts and bolts sense, is “link altering”.

Quite simply, the link thief does one of two things :

1. Erases your affiliate link from his browser window, deletes any cookies set by the link, and then proceeds to the merchant’s site via the main www url.
2. Erases your affiliate I.D. and replaces it with his. He then purchases through his own link and takes his commission as a rebate.

The solution to link theft is “link cloaking”. Essentially, you turn an obvious affiliate link such as www.clickbank.com/hop?=affiliate, into an encrypted link or you mask it behind a short domain name.

There are pros and cons with each method. Link cloaking software such as Affiliate Defender and others use javascript to encapsulate your URL into an indecipherable scramble of characters. This prevents anyone from seeing the real affiliate link at the bottom of their browser window when they mouse over

it. The only problem is that your link can still end up exposed once the user clicks on to the main site. The link often “unscrambles” and appears naked yet again in the address bar.

Domain masking, when done properly, allows you to use your own short url which redirects to the merchant site while keeping your url in the address bar. You can use domain masking with any address you choose. For example, you could register one domain name to devote to your affiliate redirects.

You can use subdomains (subdomainname.mysite.com) and also directories (www.mysite.com/product).

The downside to domain masking: the technique involves what’s called an “invisible frame”. The frame pulls in the affiliate site within the main window. Imagine your site has a set of navigation links down the left-hand side, and clicking those links causes the main window to pull up content, while leaving the left column unchanged. This is the basis of the technique – it’s just set up on one link and hidden from the surfer’s view. Unfortunately, sites like Clickbank frown upon this practice.

There’s a good chance that your redirect link will break frames and wind up exposing your affiliate URL anyways. Nothing wrong with that other than the fact that you went through a lot of work for nothing!

A greater concern: frames have a bad habit of confusing affiliate tracking applications. Your referral ID might not be recorded and you wind up losing the sale.

Obviously, you are free to test out any of these “solutions”. Just keep in mind that they aren’t fool proof. Ultimately, the link theft problem occurs much more frequently in the Internet Marketing niche than it does anywhere else due to the large number of fellow

We’ve come to the last day of the course, and it’s time to tie up the loose ends and cover some advanced topics. As you know by now, affiliate marketing can be incredibly rewarding when done properly. There are also a lot of pitfalls you need to watch out for as well. One of these is merchant fraud. Merchant fraud, unfortunately, does happen. Merchants can use any number of clever tactics to cheat you out of your commission. One of these methods is to offer multiple payment options to customers without linking each one to their affiliate tracking software. For example, let’s say that a merchant offers credit payments, payment via Paypal and payment via check to the customer.

The merchant tracks your affiliate ID up to the point of sale and credits you if the customer chooses to pay via credit card through the merchant’s main payment gateway. However, if the customer chooses Paypal or check, your affiliate ID is immediately tossed.

The only way around this clever trick is an exercise of caution on your part. When you evaluate a potential affiliate program, check to see how many payment methods the merchant offers. Secondly, after you sign up for an account, examine you referral links.

In fact, if you have the budget to spare, follow your own link and choose one of the alternate payment options and purchase a product.

Did you get credit for that sale? Great! If you didn’t receive credit, though, it’s time to can that merchant and move on to more ethical waters.

Here’s another ‘advanced’ tip to consider: use affiliate networks like Commission Junction to evaluate potential merchants. Joining programs via a network is often a better choice than signing up at individual, non-networked sites. The reason is simple: membership in an affiliate network imposes stricter standards on merchant behavior.

You also have access to a wealth of data on the overall performance of other affiliates in that merchant’s program. Last but not least, you need to focus on building trust among potential customers. If your merchant site doesn’t do a very good job of this, then send your visitors to your web site. Make it clear what products and/or information you have to offer. Again the easy way to do this is with Affiliate Enhancer

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