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You have joined your affiliate program and received your own personal referral url. You place ads for this url anywhere you can. Free ad pages, classifieds, ezines, your newsletter and website, but you don't get the response you had expected.

Now there could be a number of reasons for this, a badly constructed subject or ad text, a miss typed url or long urls breaking across 2 lines in newsletters and ezines. In the worst case, people may be cutting and pasting your links without your affiliate id.

If you are sure that your subject line and ad text are attracting the desired attention and that your url's are correctly typed and are not being broken, then affiliate id cutting could well be the problem. Id cutting is a common occurrence and can cost affiliates hundreds of dollars in lost commissions

So how do you go about protecting yourself from this? Well you'll be pleased to hear that there are a number of ways that you can protect your urls. Each method has it's own pro's and con's as with all things.

One of the quickest and easiest methods of protecting your url, is to use a redirect service such as tinyurl.com or funu.org. These work by taking your affiliate url and replacing it with a new unrelated url. You then place the new url in your advertising material, then when someone clicks on that url they are redirected to your original page. They are extremely useful for preventing long urls from breaking across 2 lines in newsletters or ezines, as they tend to produce much shorter url lengths, typically around 12 to 20 characters long.

The benefit of using the redirect service is that there is no affiliate information contained in the redirect url that can be trimmed off. But there are 2 problems associated with them. One is that your full url is displayed in the address bar of the browser, so it is still possible for people to cut and paste the url without your affiliate ids into a new browser. The other is that you can't edit the the destination of the redirect url if you need to. For example, if you use the redirect url to place ads in ezines, and your affiliate company modifies your affiliate url for some reason, you have no way to reflect that change in the redirect url.

Another more effective way to protect your urls is to use some sort of ad tracking software. This will perform 2 important tasks, the first is that it will track the number of clicks your ad is receiving, and secondly it again gives you an unrelated url with not affiliate id's to trim. Depending on the quality of your ad tracker you may also have the ability to cloak your url, so that your affiliate url is not displayed in the address bar of the web browser.

There are many sources of ad trackers available to you on the net. You can use a remotely hosted ad tracker where you pay a monthly fee for the service or you can purchase a script and host it yourself. But which ever method you choose it pays to do a little homework first, as not every one offers the same level of service. Some will offer the ability to cloak your links and some will not, some will let you edit your tracking url and again others wont.

If you have your own web hosting then you can use my preferred method that gives you complete control over how your affiliate url is displayed. With a little bit of html you can created your own cloaked pages that will display your affiliate site, but hide your affiliate information, while still allowing you to easily change your affiliate url if you need to. Due to space constraints I can't go into details on how to do this here, so I've set up a tutorial which you can view at the following url.

http://www.incomebuilder.bybweb.com/cloakpage.htm

While there is no infallible way to protect your affiliate links, the methods mentioned here should stop all but the most persistent url trimmers. With a little bit of creativity you can also increase the power of your personally hosted pages to include a signup box for your own mailing list. But that's another article in itself..