october 5, 2003

from:  jim edwards
developer, affiliate link cloaker software

dear friend,

if you use affiliate programs to sell other people's products on the internet, i have some shocking news for you. you are getting ripped off!

no, you're not getting ripped off by the affiliate programs you belong to. as long as they pay you the money you earned, and pay you on time, then you have nothing to worry about with them.

what i'm talking about is unscrupulous, sneaky, "petty shoplifter" customers who are taking your hard-earned commissions right out of your pocket... and putting that money into their pockets!

in a moment, i'm going to show you a new, amazingly easy way to "stop the bleeding" and start once again collecting the money that's rightfully yours.  but first let me tell you about... 

the dirty little secrets that no one ever talks about!

affiliate link hijacking and affiliate link bypassing are the dirty little secrets of internet marketing that no one ever talks about.

• hijacking is what happens when someone replaces your affiliate id with theirs in the affiliate link.  let’s say your affiliate id is live-well and the product site is www.ebookaboutcats.com.  then your affiliate link would be www.ebookaboutcats.com/?live-well.  
    
  say the highjacker uses the affiliate id of captain-hook.  what he would do is replace your id with his, and buy from the url www.ebookaboutcats.com/?captain-hook.
    
  the bottom line: you don’t get your commission, and the hijacker puts your money in his pocket, in the form of a discount, by buying through his own affiliate link.
  
  
• bypassing is what happens when someone sees an affiliate link and is either unfamiliar and uncomfortable with it, or just can’t stand the idea of your getting a commission (even though you’ve done the work to put the information in front of them). 
    
  so instead of buying from www.ebookaboutcats.com/?live-well, the bypasser will simply “chop off” the affiliate id at the end and simply buy from the plain url www.ebookaboutcats.com --without your affiliate id attached!
     
  the bottom line is the same: once again, you’ve been robbed of your affiliate commission.  unfortunately, as long as people can see an affiliate code in the link that you offer them, a certain number of them are destined to hijack it – or bypass it.  

and either way, you lose.  

to see a diagram what hijacking and bypassing look like -  click here!

but like i said, these are the dirty little secrets of internet marketing.  in fact, many top internet marketers aren't even aware that there's a problem, so you certainly can be excused if you don't know about this problem either.

but it's there.  one of the internet's top information marketers told me that up to 30% of all affiliate commissions are stolen by people who replace their own link to "buy at a discount" -- and it's a serious problem.

my new software program will stop up to about 80% of these thefts -- maybe even more.  (the reason we don't say it's 100% effective is -- like with a car security system versus a professional auto thief -- affiliate link cloaker can't stop someone who is bound and determined to rip you off and is willing to go to a lot of trouble to cheat you out of your $15 or $30 commission. but it will stop the vast majority of hijack and bypass attempts before they even happen.)

how i discovered the affiliate link hijacker phenomenon

as you may know, i'm very active in internet business as a profitable ebook publisher and as a writer and consultant. i'm quoted frequently in newspapers all over the country, such as the new york times.  maybe you've seen my syndicated column, "the net reporter," or heard me speak at a conference.

hundreds of ezines across the web reprint my articles, and i have seven products currently selling online, including some of the top "best-sellers" in the business-to-business, real estate, and computing & internet categories at clickbank, the affiliate service i use for virtually all my products. click here for proof.

though i make most of my money from ebook sales, i also earned a respectable portion of my income in the last 12 months -- over $25,000, in fact -- just from affiliate commissions selling other people's products.  (in fact, i belong to over 60 affiliate programs myself.  so you can see that i believe in affiliate programs and use them, just like you.)

i kept hearing rumors about affiliate hijackers

over the last year, i heard more and more rumblings about affiliate link rip-offs.  nothing anyone could really prove.  so i invested my own money to develop an early version of this software (since then it's gone through 12 revisions and upgrades) and started testing it out on my own affiliate links.

my response rates improved.  checks got bigger.  (in fact, in just six weeks after the release of my most recent book, ebook secrets exposed, i generated $1702 in affiliate sales just from links in that one ebook itself -- resulting in about an extra $680 (based on average 40% commissions) from selling other people's products through links i cloaked using this software.

in fact, here are just 4 of the 28 checks i received in june, 2002! you can click each one to see larger proof. the total of just these 4 checks is $2,532.44! click the thumbnail to see a photocopy of my actual affiliate commission checks:

i knew i was onto something.  so i started asking around...

an income stream you need to protect!

what i found was that some people -- top people -- had no idea there was a problem.  others suspected there might be a problem.  and then i heard stories like this:

• one internet publisher i know told me recently about a mailing he did to a small list to introduce a new ebook. this publisher, like many, uses clickbank and, because this was a pre-release of the product, it wasn't even listed on clickbank's market place yet... or even on his own affiliate program page!
    
  when he did the mailing he used his own affiliate links to test the conversion rates from his various mailing lists.
  
  the results were shocking!
    
  the good news was he sold 100 copies of the e-book. excellent results.
    
  the bad news was that 10 of those 100 people substituted their own clickbank id's into his affiliate link -- robbing him of $130.00! 
     
  well that's not much, you might say, but think about it this way...

suppose someone went into your wallet or purse and helped themselves to $130.00 of your money!

then it might seem much worse, wouldn't it?

• many top internet marketers routinely try to hide or disguise the affiliate links on products they resell through a complicated network of redirects, java scripts, sub-domains and other elaborate technology solutions trying to protect themselves from affiliate link hijackers. 
     
  that's ok, but there are problems with the solutions they use...
    
  the first problem is you have to be very technically sophisticated to know how to use solutions like this. 
     
  the second problem is, the more web site scripts and web servers you have to redirect a person to, the better a chance is you'll lose them before they end up on the site where you want them to buy.  if they never make it to that site, you'll never get your affiliate commission.
     
  in fact, there are a few very popular services right now that you can subscribe to that use second party servers to create sub-domains, but the problem with these programs is you are only allowed to use it for one domain. you also have to pay an annual recurring fee and, if the site goes down, you are going to lose the sale anyway.
    
  plus, with most of those sub-domain redirect services, if you just "view source" in your web browser you can see the link they're hiding anyway!
    
  other services use complicated java-scripts to cloak their links. the problem with these is that the user has to have java "enabled" in their web browser and, as viruses run rampant on the web, more and more people are turning their java "off" - rendering virtually all of those expensive java cloaking scripts useless!
     
• there are numerous instances of fraud going on through affiliate programs that are being kept very hush-hush for understandable reasons. one of the reasons the affiliate management service clickbank has to charge a $1 + 7.5% service fee to the publishers who use it is to help take care of this fraud. but when you think about it, it is not really that surprising because wherever there is money to be made, scoundrels are not far behind.

by now, you can see how you could be losing hundreds or even thousands of dollars every year due to affiliate link hijackers and bypassers. 

again, i am not talking here about the professional thief. i am talking about the person who thinks, "oh, i'll save myself $15.00 or $30.00. why should i give that money to george or mary (even though they did the work to tell me about the product) when i can simply plug in my own affiliate id instead." 

people commit these cash-draining "petty larcenies"

 against you more often than you might think!

a publisher i know released a new e-book through his own affiliates and some of them immediately decided they were going to buy it at a discount, even though he had already offered it to his entire list of affiliates at a discount. it's like the kid in the candy store. some customers won't be happy until they figure they have squeezed every dime out of everybody. 

human nature being what it is, i realize you are never going to be able to stop all of the hijackers and bypassers. i mean, even retail stores with private security forces, video cameras and devices at all of the exit doors still lose a certain amount of money each year to professional shoplifters. if they, with all of their sophisticated technology and heavy duty investments in security can't get rid of shoplifters, there is no way that you and i can on the internet. 

but we can probably foil 70% to 80% of them by making it extremely difficult for them to hijack or bypass your affiliate links.

an international team put together the solution
that will save your commissions from being hijacked!

i have literally gone around the world to find resources to help you stop getting ripped off. as a result, i have come up with a unique and necessary software product for everyone who sells anything through other people's affiliate programs. 

it's called the "affiliate link cloaker" and, wow, is it powerful! as the headline says, "it stops affiliate link hijackers... dead in their tracks!" 

here's how easy it is to set up and use in just minutes.

let's use an affiliate link for my latest ebook, “ebook secrets exposed,” as an example. 

here is a "naked" affiliate link... 

http://hop.clickbank.net/?ebookfire/ebksecrets 

(the highlighted word, ebookfire, is my affiliate id in this link.)

now, let's cloak the entire link. i'll walk you through it, step-by-step!

step one: copy and paste your affiliate link into the affiliate link cloaker. 

step two: come up with a simple, short name for a web page. first we'll create the page. later, we'll put it on your website. for now, just give it a name.

step three: give your page a title. (this is what people will see in the little blue bar at the top left of their web browser.)

step four: you just click a button ("create page") and the cloaked link page is created and saved to your hard drive.

step five: click another button ("upload") and the page is automatically uploaded to your website - no html skills required!

the whole operation takes about 45 seconds!

remember the old "naked" link
http://hop.clickbank.net/?ebookfire/ebksecrets

now, we've turned it into a "cloaked" link and, the best part is, it looks like a page on your website! here it is:
http://www.affiliatelinkcloaker.com/ese.html

what this means to you is, when people use this link, they won't know they're buying through an affiliate program. they'll think they're looking at a page on your website!

not only that, but when people click on a regular "naked" affiliate link (especially with clickbank), they'll see a coded url in their browser's address bar that looks like this:

but with affiliate link cloaker, even once they get to the destination website -- the one that pays you your affiliate commission -- it still looks like they're just at a page on your website! like this:

but even with this level of cloaking security, some of your more technically sophisticated customers may try to find an affiliate link. the way they'll do this is by looking at your "source code".

normally, source code will immediately reveal the "naked" affiliate link, this is true with the vast majority of other cloaking techniques available on the market.

but it's not a problem with affiliate link cloaker!

to see what i mean, click here >> http://www.affiliatelinkcloaker.com/ese.html.

if you try to find the affiliate link by clicking view>>source on your browser, you can’t!  because all you’ll get is a confusing garble of hexadecimal code, like this:

now, if you don't know what hexadecimal code is, don't worry. here's my point: because your affiliate link has been totally encrypted, only the most determined professional affiliate thief could hijack or bypass it.

the bottom line is, the vast majority of your customers will not be able to rip you off by substituting their affiliate id for yours to "hijack" the actual link you send them.

the best part about affiliate link cloaker is that
it's so darned easy to use!

you can do it in a matter five steps and it'll take you less than a minute from the time you type in the information until the time the link is installed and active on your website - ready to make you money!

all you have to know how to do is type in the information, click a few buttons and the program automatically uploads the cloaked page to your website. in fact, you can use it with as many different websites and affiliate links as you want! 

or, if you want, you can give your affiliate link cloaker to your web master and have them make and post the pages for you. 

affiliate link cloaker is so easy. it doesn't require any design... no html skills... no scripts to install... no complicated java scripts.

just point, click... and "cloak"!

so how good is affiliate link cloaker? 

here's what neil shearing, one of the internet's most respected analysts of technical e-commerce software has to say... 

now, you're probably wondering how many hundreds of dollars this is going to cost you.

well, let me ask you: how much is a program like affiliate link cloaker worth to you?

actually, value is a hard thing to determine sometimes for a piece of software. a lot of companies charge based on the amount of research and development that went into the product. 

i don't think that is fair to you in this case because of the many, many hours that were required to create this product, but i do think you should consider how much money you have lost so far by not having this product and how much money you will save in the future. 

let's look at it this way. a conservative estimate is that between 10% and 30% of affiliate sales go awry because of hijacked or bypassed links. so let's say you make $300.00 a month on your affiliate commission (you may make more, you may make less, but $300.00 is a very easy number to work with for this example).

now, that means that you are losing anywhere between $30.00 and $90.00 a month in commissions that are being stolen right out from under your nose.

$30.00 to $90.00 a month gone-- the same as if they came and took it right from your purse or wallet!

do you realize that's $360.00 to $1,080.00 a year? 

so how much would it be worth to you to save that money? 

well, i don't know about you, but i'd pay $100.00 once to save 3 to 10 times that much money a year – that is, save $360.00 to $1,080.00 this year… next year… every year -- forever.

so that’s my price: $100.  hey, i’ll even take $3.00 off so you can enjoy a small coffee drink at starbuck’s: $97.

but wait a second.  maybe you’re not ready to buy this at that price.  i’ll make it easier for you, and i’ll even give you a reward because you are willing to take action now! i will let you have the affiliate link cloaker for only $59.

that’s right – you can save almost 40% off the regular price.  but you must take action immediately!

now, the best thing about this product is it's easy to use and it is 100% guaranteed for 3 full months. you can get a refund for any reason.  but i'm going to ask you to put affiliate link cloaker to an even tougher test:

if you don't think affiliate link cloaker saved you at least three times what you paid for it after you've used it for three months, just ask me for a refund.  (that's a 1,200% annual rate of return i'm talking about!)

it will only take you a few minutes to learn how to use it, so try it out. see if you don't discover all of the uses for helping you make more sales as well as helping you stop getting ripped off. this really is one of the best products available for the serious internet marketer. 

even if it only pays for itself in the first few months, remember, after that, everything else is pure profit. not to mention the peace of mind that you are finally protecting yourself from affiliate link hijackers. the worst thing about getting ripped off from your affiliate commissions is that you never even know it's happening! 

so do yourself a favor by getting a copy of this incredibly valuable software. you could find that your commission checks increase by a huge spike!

you must order right now to ensure getting the special price!

you can't lose with our 100%,
ironclad, 3-month money-back guarantee
  

here's how to order right now!

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purchase online now with credit card or online check by secure server

note: this product is digitally delivered. you will not receive anything in the mail.

p.p.p.s.: still have questions? check out our frequently asked questions page - faq page and our testimonials page from people just like you who are using this breakthrough software right now!