Okay, I will freely admit that I have made mistakes in my career. Lots of them.

But none of them more painful than the one I am about to share with you.

About four years ago, I was working with a merchant on a lead generation program. They needed leads, but couldn't generate any good leads. They were struggling and were referred to me by one of my clients.

They agreed to pay $18.00 for every qualified form that was filled out on their site. We got to work.

One of the first things that we did was we setup Pay Per Click accounts through Overture (now Yahoo! Search Marketing) and Network Advertisers.

Now, here is the mistake that I made. I setup the URLs in Overture and the Networks with my affiliate code so it would go directly from the Yahoo! search and the sites where the ads appeared to the merchant site. I didn't want it to go to a landing page on my site as that would be an extra hop and that would cause extra "fallout" and I didn't want that.

I was spending about $1,000.00 per week on click charges collectively and I was getting between 140-180 forms filled out per day. Now, I'm not great with math, but that was some serious money, and you know the saying, "Laughing all the way to the bank?" That was me.

Then things stopped. And stopped hard. It was like turning off a faucet. The company asked me where the leads had gone and I had no explanation.

Then I found out. It seemed that my name came up in their board meeting as the top affiliate for the last 30 days. They were all very excited about the new business that was being generated, but they were also concerned by the large weekly payments they were sending to me. It was a major expense - even though their revenues had never been higher.

"How is he doing it?", one of the board members asked. "We don't know," replied another. It was then suggested to look at the web log files.

There is was, in black and white, every site I was advertising on, every keyword I was using, etc. They called the biggest referrer, a site I was paying to place ads on, and cut their own deal. They created their own PPC campaigns based on the highest converting keywords.

They cut me right out of the loop. It hurt. It hurt real bad. I remember that I had to go and get a "real" job because I had stopped working altogether because the money was so good.

The next campaign that I did, I was smarter. I used a redirect on my server to bounce the traffic from my site to the merchant's site.

Here is how you do it. You want to do a 301 Permanent Redirect. For more information see our comprehensive article on 301 Redirects (members area). Here is an example.

I would create a PPC ad or a text ad and send the click to www.mydomain.com/bluewidget/ and since I don't want the user to go to a page that they can't order on, I do a 301 Redirect that send them from /bluewidget/ to www.merchant.com/?affid

Here is how it would look in the HTACCESS file:

# Redirects (from site path to URL)
Redirect 301 /bluewidget/ http://www.merchant.com/?affid

Sometimes, if it is a big merchant, or one that also does SEO, or one that might use their affiliates as a way to do market research, I will bounce the redirect across two domains instead of one. Or, another option is to use IP Delivery to serve the merchant a different page. For example, if the merchant tries to view the /bluewidget/ page, it automatically redirects to their site so they know you are doing a redirect. However, if you use an IP Delivery system, it will detect their IP and since it is on your list, it will serve them a plain HTML page which is a "dummy" landing page all about their product. No one sees this page but them. It is a little sneaky, but it protects your work from unethical merchants.

Affiliate Marketing is one of our biggest revenue generators. Don't let your hard work fall into the wrong hands. Protect yourself and your business. Use the 301 Redirect in all of your affiliate campaigns.

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© 2004-2006, Web Marketing Now
Jerry West is the Director of Internet Marketing. He has been consulting on the web since 1996 and has assisted hundreds of companies gain an upper-hand over their competition. Visit Web Marketing Now for the latest in marketing tips that are tested and proven.

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