"Refresh" Your Chances Of Collecting That ClickBank Commission ...

By Mike Merz
Posted Wednesday, November 17, 2004

ClickBank has long been considered a simple, cost effective way to promote digital products Online.

Would be merchants are charged a one time, relatively small start up fee, which will enable them to use ClickBank' ecure payment processing services to accept Online payment (fee per transaction). What makes ClickBank even more popular is their affiliate network, which allows merchants to promote their wares by establishing an affiliate program, listed free in the ClickBank MarketPlace. The merchant sets the commission rate, and has the ability to build an affiliate "army" to help promote their digital product/service. From that point on, ClickBank takes care of everything. Payment processing, affiliate commission payment, stats, etc.

But there is one major, easily seen downside to affiliate promotions. ClickBank uses what is known as "hoplinks" as the affiliate commission tracking method.

Here is an example:
< (http://hop.clickbank.net/?xxxxx.im4newbies) >

The section of the affiliate "hoplink" containing the x's is replaced by the affiliate's ID. The text that follows (after the period ...) is the merchant ID.

The problem occurs when promoting this URL, as is.

Anyone with a ClickBank affiliate ID has the ability to replace the advertiser's ID with their own, even if they are making the purchase themselves, and take the commission.

The advertiser, that went through the pains of promoting the URL in the first place, gets nothing.

This META REFRESH tip will help, by making the ClickBank association less obvious.

IMPORTANT NOTE: You must be able to upload files to your site's server.

Copy and paste the following code into an HTML editor and save it to your web server as whateveryoulike.html:

IMPORTANT!
In order for the following code to work, replace the "(" with "" ...)

(HEAD)(TITLE)Your Affiliate Program Title(/TITLE)
(META http-equiv="refresh" content="0;
url=(http://www.YouraffiliateprogramsURL)")
(/HEAD)(BODYBGCOLOR="#FFFFFF")(/BODY)(/HTML)

After you save this as whateveryoulike.html, and upload the file to your server, you will be able to link to the program with this URL: (http://www.Yourdomain.com/whateveryoulike.html)

This will help raise your campaign's reliability a notch above the other affiliates using the traditional methods (and it looks a lot more professional, to boot ..;).

Another benefit to using this technique is the ability to track your ads. You can save your page as whateveryoulike1.html, whateveryoulike2.html, etc., giving each campaign a different promotion code, and enabling you to find out which one is drawing the best responses.

This method will not prevent your commissions from being "stolen", but it should definitely help.

To learn how you can make ClickBank's services even more secure, visit (http://im4newbies.com/clickbanknews.htm).

About the Author
Mike Merz is a well-known Internet marketing consultant, specializing in Online Marketing newbie start ups, and owner of the Top5News Group, featuring Internet Marketing For Newbies < (http://im4newbies.com) >