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

By John Hocking
Posted Friday, December 31, 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.

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_Description)

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_Description)");

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.

About the Author
John Hocking created (http://www.guidetoebookmarketing.com), A resource site for those looking for information on creating and marketing ebooks. You will find hundreds of articles, ebook reviews and resource links.