Affiliates, Zip The Lips Or Lose
Just a word to the wise to all my fledgling affiliates out there. If you do ever find a gem of a campaign, for the love of all that is holy, keep your pie hole shut. It happened with the Craigslist exploit and it will most assuredly hit the fan with the next marketing craze, but if you figure something out, do your damnedest to keep it locked up like the federal reserve.
It might not have happened to you yet, but it's happened to me before. I get a great idea and ask someone's opinion on it and the next thing you know, down goes my money and up goes the competition page. "Oh, I didn't copy your site but I thought I'd test the waters." Kiss your beautiful profits good-bye my friend.
What you might also wonder is how, even if you haven't told anyone, competition keeps popping up on your niche terms. Well, a little known fact is that affiliate managers aren't limited to viewing reports for the affiliates directly underneath them. Nope, in fact, they can most likely view yours so what I recommend is that you figure out a way to cloak your actual sub tracking. If you're confused as to what sub tracking is, read How To Put Tracking Code On Your Landing Page to bring yourself up to speed (you're most likely losing money).
To cloak your sub tracking, you will need a place to store your actual Sub values that correspond to a number and you can use that number as the tracking ID instead of the live keyword information OR you can encrypt the Sub values on the fly. That will keep other affiliate managers' grubby little hands from spying the keywords that are converting best for you. This is a tip directly from my brilliant affiliate manager.
The next thing you might wonder is whether there is currently any software available for you to do such a thing automagically. Well, there definitely is. If you want to protect yourself, use any of the following (more will be added later)-
As always, good luck and maximize profitability!
Scott
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January 24th, 2008 at 6:40 am
This is definitely an area that I need to concentrate more on. I used Affiliate Radar for a couple of months last fall and it was a great program but I couldn’t justify the monthly cost.
Have you had an experience with Keyword Radar?
January 24th, 2008 at 10:24 am
@ClarkeW: Yeah, I’ve tried both and they’re both somewhat difficult to set up. That’s my major gripe. However, I can tell you that I know of some pretty cool software coming out that I’m not supposed to talk about yet, but I will be posting about it soon (about a week).
January 24th, 2008 at 11:16 am
Great, I look forward to hearing about it. I’ve think that I’ve got an idea of what you’re talking about.
January 24th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
@ClarkeW: Yeah, it’s probably pretty widespread already. The owner is doing a good job of making it seem like it’s under wraps.