Particularly those that have read a little about affiliate marketing, commissions and the whole shebang about how you make money by selling other people’s products.

You know the drill. You put in a lot of effort to write great content, conduct reviews and the like in order to present a valuable post for your readers.

It turns out that a lot of your buyers are aware of affiliate sales techniques and will simply refuse to click your affiliate link.

Cloaked links are also being detected by the astute visitor. Internet users are becoming too smart for the average affiliate. For some unfathomable reason they feel better about clicking plain URLs and will avoid links that look like affiliate redirects.

Are you getting loads of traffic and no commissions. There is a solution to this emerging problem. Affiliate cookie stuffing.

Affiliate Cookie Stuffer is a Wordpress plugin that puts stuffs your affiliate cookie onto the visitor’s computer when they read your product review, even before they click any of your links.

You can write reviews with plain URLs knowing that your affiliate cookie is being stuffed in the background. They will have no idea that by the time they have finished reading your well researched article and click your innocent looking, plain text link, you have silent stuffed your affiliate cookie on their PC. When they buy the product or service you are promoting, you earn the commission. It is the way it used to be before internet users learned about affiliate links.

Affiliate cooking stuffing works in the background while your visitor is quietly and confidently reading your post. It works by allowing you to add your affiliate link to any post or page. It comes with a simple interface that is accessed from the Wordpress admin panel.

When your cookie stuffed page or post is viewed your affiliate link is quietly and invisibly called in the background. The visitor has no idea that this is happening. They can only see plain text links that you add to your post.

After all, there’s no need to make your affiliate link publicly visible within the post any more, as the visitor to your blog has already been cookied.

As far as they’re concerned, you’ve written a product review with no intent of financial gain, and they’re ready to go through to the site and buy.

Affiliate Cookie Stuffer is simple to install and use. Just upload and activate the plugin, go to the settings page and start adding your affiliate links to as many posts or pages as you like.

There has been a lot of talk about this technique being “Black Hat” and frowned upon by some affiliate networks. What is Black Hat? That is when you do something evil in the internet world with the intent to gain an advantage.

Is researching a product and writing a review comparing it with a few competing products evil? Is getting paid for you work evil? Is securing your business by locking the back door when you are at the front counter evil? No, and nor is stuffing your affiliate cookie when you have invested time and money into a product review. You are, after all, protecting your business interests.

Affiliate cookie stuffing could be done in a black hat way and that is certainly not recommended. It can get you banned by your affiliate program.  So if you are going to use it, use it without being evil. Keep your cookie stuffing relevant to the product you are promoting.

The plugin can be downloaded, installed and operational within minutes. It is reasonably priced at $27 last time I looked. Recovering just one single affiliate commission will pay back the purchase price!

I have got it and no, this post is not stuffed with any cookies. If  you want to claim back those lost affiliate commissions then there’s no doubt in my mind that Affiliate Cookie Stuffer will give you a head start on other affiliates.

I suggest you keep it real and do not go stuffing all your affiliate cookies on every post as that is evil. Keep it real and use this affiliate cookie stuffing plugin on pages and posts that relate to the affiliate program you are linking to.

Avoid stuffing eBay cookies as I read about a lawsuit where eBay is suing over cookie stuffing. If you were promoting eBay in a positive manner and offering genuine BIN and auction products it might not be considered evil. Keep in mind that sending too many visitors to your eBay partner link will dilute the quality of your clicks and you’ll get less per click. You be the judge. If it was me, I would avoid eBay. The support page (available after downloading the cookie stuffing plugin) goes into detail about eBay and affiliate cookie stuffing. You be the judge.

Brendan.

Do you have a small business (1-10 employees), that is currently getting more customers offline than online? Do you want to change that? Are your clientele mostly local? For example…

• a computer retailer or repair service in Sydney, Australia – own your geographic niche and pull in the customers who are looking for a business just like yours.
• a landscaper in Melbourne, Victoria – get the jump on competitors.
• a farm supplies shop in Bundaberg, QLD – build a devoted clientele.
• an Italian restaurant in Adelaide, SA – run “Net specials of the week”.
• a busker in Budapest – get hired for “gigs” for 100 miles around
• a deli in Deniliquin, NSW – differentiate yourself and take business from competitors.
• in fact, any type of local business or service – attract and support customers online.

You might think that the Net, more specifically your own Web site, offers few opportunities for businesses with a customer base clustered in a small geographic area. After all, the Web is “world wide”… a “global medium.”

And you would have been fairly correct, up until recently…

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