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    What is an affiliate thief? Well it could be you and me.
     
    2 categories:
     
    1) Clickbank Thief. Deserves its own category. Most affiliate programs DO NOT allow you to purchase and earn for yourself a commission, or rather, spare yourself at least 50% of the expense. Clickbank does. If you notice affiliate marketers pining for your purchase with their amazing bonus offers, it is in large part due to this.
     
    2 caveats:
     
    a) In order to receive the money from clickbank which you accrue while buying items with your own affiliate link, you need to have made sales through several money mediums, 2 types of credit card, + paypal, so unless you are actually also selling to the public at large, you will have a hard time getting hold of your money… ( I speak from experience People!)
     
    b) When it comes to Internet Marketing, once you are clued in enough to realize you can legally do this, it is usually since you have purchased so many IM products and still not found success or that which you find worthy of devoting enough time. Honestly, there should be some allowances for those people who are really interested in testing out a new product, but keep saying NO MORE BUYING, but cant help it every time a product launch is froth with irresistable copy, and underneath is really a sub par product, that you somehow already own something similar in your OWN NAME in a jumbled up collection of products you bought resell rights for!
     
    2) Human Nature.
     
    People do NOT like to see others succeed. I dont know why. If you knew that an item would cost the EXACT same if you were to click on their link and help them earn a few bucks, or if you were to clear your cookies, or open up another browser and NOT buy it through their link.. then WHY oh WHY would you NOT help the individual who sent you there? I find myself guilty of this if it’s a fellow IM’er who I know and I dont want them to know that I am yet again purchasing more products.
     
    Human Nature is a funny thing. When I was auditioning for the NEXT Internet Millionaire Reality Show, I asked people in the Stomper forum (during my trial membership) to vote for me. One woman wrote.. I gave you a 9, since I wanted to reserve the right to give someone else a 10. Lady you can give us all 10′s, I mean GEE WHIZ… some people… none of those videos deserved even a 9 :) !!
     
    Sorry for that little tangent…
     
    I recently read a report that recommended using http://www.pinurl.com to mask your affiliate links and allow your link to be cookied and avoid people working HARD (yes, some people spend time on stealing your commissions, with NO benefit to them whatsoever).. You just paste the affiliate link and they supply you with a nice truncated code that is indiscernable.
     
    For example. Lets say I wanted you to sign up to Clickbank, so you could sell the items from their marketplace and make tons and tons of money :) , but instead of mentioning the word Clickbank, I would refer to it as ‘a treasure trove of available affiliate products with skyrocketed commissions that will result in easy no brainer residual income for you’ (good copy on the fly eh? ;) ). YOu may be intrigued to click. So which link would get you more:
     
    http://pinurl.com/27i (What pinurl provided for me)
     
    or
     
    http://theresults.aff20.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=BLOG (the actual affiliate link)
     
    or
     
    http://getstartedtodayonline.dreamhosters.com/recommends/clickbank.html (this is a very popular way to indirectly bring visitors to a site via an affiliate link)
     
    or lets be honest… after seeing one of the last two choices, would you just click http://www.clickbank.com and cut out (at not cost to you) the affiliate marketer?
     

    Are you an affiliate thief?
     
    ~~ andrea

    P.S. I have been testing out different solutions to combat affiliate thief’s. The first Affiliate Cloner is really easy to use and creates really short and sweet links.


    The second, Affiliate Link Cloaker is like the Ferrari Enzo of tools to fight the affiliate theif’s. I have been using it for nearly 1 year. It’s really good at creating professional links that don’t look like affiliate links. Go beat up the affiliate thief today and make them cry rivers and earn more cash!

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