Guard Your Affiliate Data

Posted on May 17th, 2008 in Affiliate Marketing

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This topic comes up time and time again on affiliate forums and blogs. Good affiliate marketing data is extremely valuable. If you find a good set of keywords, a good traffic source, a good unsaturated offer, or something similar, you stand to make a good deal of money if you can keep your competition from finding out exactly what you’re doing. Just one more affiliate doing exactly what you are can significantly hurt your earnings. But it’s not just affiliates you need to worry about. Many affiliate networks have in-house search marketing departments that run their own campaigns, and almost all merchants run their own in-house campaigns as well. So what can you do to prevent the competition from cashing in on your discoveries?

• Keep Your Mouth Shut
  It’s tempting when you find a potential goldmine to brag to your online friends about how much you’re making with it. If you take a look at year-old posts on internet marketing forums, you will likely find information about campaign ideas that are now completely saturated. Why are they saturated? Cause they were winners. If they had been kept quiet, they may have generated a lot more income for a longer period of time. The internet is a big place and there are many greedy people who want to make money without working for it. Don’t give them the opportunity if you can avoid it.
• Affiliate Networks Don’t Need To Know Your Traffic Sources
  Seriously. Almost every time Nickycakes joins a new network, the first thing they ask is where his traffic is coming from and what offers he’s currently running. They DON’T NEED THIS INFORMATION. Even if you are running an offer for them, the ONLY time this information is relevant to them is if the merchant comes to them and complains about your lead quality. Even then, the only reason they would want your keyword data or any level of access to your landing page is to STEAL YOUR DATA. But aren’t the Affiliate Networks on your side? NO. They’re on THEIR side. They want to make as much money as possible. If you are successfully running a campaign on their network, and they find out exactly how you’re promoting it, they would love to give this information to their hundreds of other affiliates to generate more income for themselves. Affiliate managers get commissions. The only incentive for them to keep your data private is to keep you as an affiliate, but affiliates rarely have any way of knowing if an affiliate network is sharing their data with other affiliates. If they insist on you giving them your traffic sources for any reason other than the merchant witholding payment, then tell them you are unwilling to share it. If they still make an issue about it, move to one of the other hundreds of networks out there.
• Hide Your Referer Data
  For the less technically savvy internet marketers, when you send traffic to an offer, the merchant as well as the affiliate network can see the page the traffic came from. This information is sent by the browser. If you market offers without a landing page, this means they can see exactly what keywords you are paying for on adwords/ysm/msn/whatever. They can and do use this information to build in-house campaigns so you need to make sure to hide this information. How you can you get rid of the referer information? There are several methods of doing so, but the most effective seems to be a double meta redirect, or a meta redirect with a delayed javascript redirect as a backup (thanks slightlyshady). If this is too advanced, just get on google and look up meta redirect and use a simple version of that for stripping the referer data.
• Hide Your Landing Pages and Affiliate Sites
  If you run a VPS with all your landing pages on the same IP, it’s just a matter of time before someone uses one of the various online tools like myIpNeighbors to find them all. Spreading out your pages over several shared hosting accounts or buying a bunch of IP’s will help you keep your stuff hidden.

Obviously Nickycakes’ goal for this blog is to help people with internet marketing, and yes, there is a ton of information on here that can make you a ton of money if used properly, but you won’t see all of Nickycakes’ campaigns listed here, especially not the big moneymakers. Helping people is different from sharing your data. Keep in mind that there is a big difference between being secretive about your campaign data and being an unhelpful prick. Don’t be that prick, but don’t let people steal your dinner off your plate.

Keep it real.