HOWTO: Link to rival affiliates, keep your affiliate ID

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d60eba

d60eba

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Nov 21, 2007
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Hi,

Quick technique that I've found useful for product review sites. WARNING: Requires PHP and some technical faff. (And it only works for cookie-based affiliate tracking).

Here's the situation:

1. I say product is good
2. I want to back this up by showing that another site thinks the same as me
3. BUT I don't want to link to that other site and have the user click their affiliate link

Here's what I do:

1. If you're linking from a page for a single product, just stuff a cookie for the product there and then. You don't even need to be sneaky: just make a 400x400 iframe with the product site and call it a 'site preview window'.
2. Link to the external site via a PHP Proxy you host. I use phpproxy which is on source forge
3. Have that link open in a JS 'lightbox' style window. I use greybox. Part of your stays visible behind the window.

So when the user browses the external site, the cookies will be saved by the Proxy and not on their machine. So even if they browse to the merchant site through an affiliate link the cookie you pre-stuffed will be the only one they have.

Finally, you should hack the Proxy slightly to stip out frames and iframes in case the site you are linking to is cloaking their affiliate links via a frame. In phpproxy I just added this to the process_images function:

Code: 
$parse->html = preg_replace("!<frame[^>]+>!is",
                       '', $parse->html);               
                       
$parse->html = preg_replace("!<iframe[^>]+>.*?</iframe>!is",
                       '', $parse->html);
The user will then just see a blank page, hopefully think WTF, close the JS window and be back on your page. Not ideal but better than nothing.

If you don't want to cookie-stuff you could also add code to this part of the proxy to search for affiliate links and replace in your id.

Hope this helps someone.

Cheers,

Leon
 


If you're linking from a page for a single product, just stuff a cookie for the product there and then
Click to expand...

Not a very smart mother fucker are we? Let's go steal another affiliates commission, yeah that's cool.

Incoming ban hammer in 5...4...3...2........
 
I've never thought of using lightbox that way before. Could be quite effective when allowing users to preview an authoritative site--such as CNN or Wikipedia.
 
Rage9 said:
Not a very smart mother fucker are we? Let's go steal another affiliates commission, yeah that's cool.

Incoming ban hammer in 5...4...3...2........
Click to expand...

Sorry, I forgot WickedFire was a community for ethical marketers ;-)

Anyway, who's stealing who's commission? I stir up a reader's interest in a product, get them all excited, and include links to other reviews. But one of those other reviews then steals MY commission. This technique just makes sure that doesn't happen.

Of course, if you're uncomfortable with it just don't link to any other sites.
 
GoogleSearchSux said:
What if that affiliate is also stuffing cookies on his website?
Click to expand...

If they're stuffing via an iframe then the code to strip out iframes will prevent that. But if they're stuffing via a redirected image then you can't prevent that unless you add code in to strip that specific image (which is hard to do generically as every image would be different). So I suppose you'd have to check every page you link to, see if they're stuffing, then strip their stuff code.
 
Hehe, there's just so much more evil ways to stole commissions. This was nice and detectable way to do it. If you want to be a real asshole.. oh yeah, there are some good ways ;)
 
micfire said:
Hehe, there's just so much more evil ways to stole commissions. This was nice and detectable way to do it. If you want to be a real asshole.. oh yeah, there are some good ways ;)
Click to expand...

I'm not trying to be an arsehole with this. If someone gave me two choices:

1. I don't link to your site
2. I link to your site, but you don't take any commissions from that user

I'd still go for option (1), at least I'm getting a link and brand recognition.

I suppose you could contact the sites being linked to and offer them that choice. It would be interesting to see what they say.
 
To be completely fair to d60eba, I don't think he's stealing affiliates commissions here. He brought in the traffic, he deserves the commission - it's just an unusual idea because I don't think I've ever felt the need to link to another affiliate's site (or anyone other than the merchants site) to convince the user to buy.

If you're iframing a competitors site, you might also be running the risk of them changing their page - if they find out what you're doing, they could adjust that page. Or they might just adjust it anyway.

It's an interesting idea, I don't really know where I stand with it though because I'm not sure if you'd be doing it for any real benefit, or if you'd simply be doing it because you can?
 
illdave said:
I don't really know where I stand with it though because I'm not sure if you'd be doing it for any real benefit, or if you'd simply be doing it because you can?
Click to expand...

The need arose because I didn't want to write fake reviews, or just paste in some sales dirge from the publisher's site. So my cunning plan was to write a factual intro to the product, then cite user feedback from around the web. But of course citing feedback meant often linking to other affiliates.
 
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