Clickbank Vendors: Two Simple Ways You Can Help Affiliates Protect Their Sales

by John Hocking

Published on this site: May 18th, 2004

1. How To Remove Your Affiliates Clickbank Id From The URL.
   
   As a merchant, you can hide the clickbank affiliate id for your affiliates by creating a redirect page and pointing your default hoplink to the redirect.
   
   When some uses your hoplink
   http://hop.clickbank.net/?affid/yourid, the cookie will be set and they will land on your redirect page.
   
   The redirect will send them to your domain without adding the ?hop= information. The cookie is already set and does not need to be shown.
   
   This will help protect your affiliates commission and give your site a more professional appearance.
   
   In the code examples below, you will need to replace [ and ] with less then and greater then symbols.
   
   Create a file called hoplink.php
   
   Add the following code
   
   [?php
   header("Location: http://www.yourdomain.com"); exit; ?]
   
   Upload hoplink.php to the root of your domain.
   
   Login into your clickbank account.
   Click to view or modify your account settings.
   Click to modify your account.
   
   Under Business Info, change the url of your website to be http://www.yourdomain.com/hoplink.php
   
   Click on save changes.
   
   Now when a visitor clicks on a hoplink, it appears that they came directly to your site and the affiliate's id is no longer exposed. For this technique to be completely effective, the affiliate needs to cloak the hoplink as well.
   
   
2. How to Cloak Your Clickbank Vendor Id Using PHP
   
   Most clickbank affiliate theft is caused by the fact that is easy to rebuild a hoplink and get credit for your own purchase. All you really need to know is the vendor id.
   
   All you have to do is look at the source code of a typical sales link and you will see the vendor id.
   
   For example:
   http://www.clickbank.net/sell.cgi?YourVendorId/1/Product_Des
   cription
   
   To rebuild the hoplink you simply use
   http://hop.clickbank.net/?AffiliatesId/YourVendorId
   
   Now when you click on the hoplink and the original affiliate has lost a sale.
   
   As you can see, without knowing the vendor id, you can not successfully rebuild the hoplink and the affiliates sale would be protected.
   
   Below is an example of how to do this in PHP.
   
   You will need to replace [ and ] with less then and greater then symbols.
   
   Create a file called order.php
   
   Add the following code
   
   [?php
   
   header("Location:
   http://www.clickbank.net/sell.cgi?YourVendorId/1/Product_Des
   cription");
   exit;
   ?]
   
   Just replace YourVendorID with your Clickbank ID Replace 1 with your product number Replace Product_Description with your Product Description
   
   Upload order.php into the same folder as your sales page.
   
   Now link to order.php instead of using the raw order link and your Vendor ID is never exposed
   
   This will make it very hard for affiliates to rob other affiliates of their commissions.
   
   I encourage you to make these simple changes to protect the commissions of your affiliates.

John Hocking created http://www.guidetoebookmarketing.com,
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