Will stuffing cookies get me banned from affiliate networks?
February 21, 2010 – 1:13 pmI have been doing a bit of research lately about cookie stuffing. You will have read the articles, commentaries and comments on the commentaries about a few high-flying affiliates who are the subject of legal action by eBay. With some much noise about cookie stuffing it may come as a surprise that it is difficult to get a straight answer on it.
Cookie stuffing is a term applied to any technique that leads to a tracking cookie being placed on a visitors browsers from a merchant site without the visitor intentionally visiting the merchant site and in most cases, without the visitor’s awareness of the cookie. The purpose is to increase income to the affiliate whose cookie gets added to the visitor’s browser.
The title of this post presents a challenging question and one for which you will see many different answers. The debate about stuffing affiliate cookies is an emotionally-charge one. It is this way because money is involved. If it involved helping some poor schmuck to get enough food for a day no one would carry the story. Once money becomes part of it, everyone wants a piece of the action.
Affiliates Earn Money
As an affiliate it is most undesirable to earn no money or to earn it but by fraudulent means. Earning no money sort of means that you are not an affiliate as affiliates earn money. Earning it by fraudulent means sort of means that you are not an affiliate as affiliates earn money honestly.
If however you are an affiliate and you are tweaking your sales pages, writing product reviews and making sure your posts contain just the right combination of high ranking keywords, then all is sweet in the world … if you are earning some money, that is.
If you are not making money, or not making enough, then that is when you start looking at ways of super-charging your blog with the latest $197 gimmick that screams at you from a sales page. Believe me, there are plenty of them around.
Whatever you do, don’t fall for any of the black-hat techniques, unless you are a bit smarter than the high-fliers who are currently feeling the wrath of eBay. Going black-hat is just asking for trouble. There are plenty of high-priced (some $500+) website enhancements you can purchase that claim to be 99.9% invisible to bots and yet stuff affiliate cookies like crazy. Untold riches await those who dare enter the forbidden territory, so long as you cough up the $500 first. I suggest if you want to go down that track you put aside a few $100,000 for legal representation as well as the $500 for the product.
The reason being, as soon as any of the major affiliate networks, eBay, Amazon, CJ, Clickbank, detect you, you’re done for. It is just not worth making a bad name for yourself by getting banned by any of the big players. If you stuff cookies like some people send spam, expect to get banned from most affiliate networks.
White-hat cookie stuffing on the other hand is designed to ensure you get the payment for the sale generated from your page. If it is used any other way it could be considered unethical. How do you cookie stuff using white-hat techniques?
It is a matter of stuffing cookies responsibly. Cookie stuffing, when done responsibly, is no different to the way things used to be a few years back.
If you use your blog as an affiliate sales plaform then you know how it is. You spend hours comparing the features of two or three similar products, you write an article about each product and get permission to post copyright product images on your site to promote those products and then you choose the product that gets your vote – your recommendation.
You embed your affiliate links in the article so that people, after reading your review and having decided to make a purchase based on your recommendation, click through and buy. You get paid, the product supplier gets paid, the visitor gets a product they are happy with. Everybody wins.
The difference today is that web visitors are wising up to the multitude of product review articles that litter the internet. For every one well-written article there are 99 poorly written ones, mostly copied from each other and slapped up on blogs published anywhere from Texas to Tuscany.
The result of this is that often you miss out on the sales commission. Why? Because of the flood of rubbish being posted by get-rich-quick enthusiasts who purchased a $197 product that told them they can make a fortune by mass-producing blogs and minisites with recycled content. It has never worked and it never will. The trouble is, the actions of these uninformed get-rich-quick website owners are giving every other affiliate a bad rap.
Stuffing your affiliate cookie in your quality review helps overcome many of these issues.
- You are ensuring that even though the visitor may go direct to the sales page, you will get paid when they make a purchase.
- Over a period of time a lot of those low quality get-rich-quick sites will die off as you will be making a genuine and respectable income from your hard work while they get paid equivalent to the amount of work and effort they put into the review (almost nothing).
- You and the product supplier both win as the quality of reviews remaining on active websites (of which yours is one) begins to go back up. The poor quality ones will always be there but there will be less and less as you get paid what you deserve and can afford to promote and improve your site and quality content.
It is hard to believe that any affiliate network is going to frown upon the proper and respectful use of affiliate cookie stuffing for these reasons.
Another obstacle to clinching the sale is that people are busy. They may have enjoyed your article and be willing to buy but don’t have the time. They write down the name of the product and go to bed. Next day, they Google the product you recommended and go to the merchant site directly and purchase it. You miss out on the commission.
Cookie stuffing helps both the affiliate and the visitor in these cases. You get the commission and your visitor need not be badgered into the sale but gently guided toward the compelling reasons for making the purchase decision. With your cookie safely tucked away on the visitor’s browser, she can take a day or two to make the decision without depriving you of the well-deserved commission once she makes up her mind to buy.
So, to sum it up, follow these simple rules to avoid getting banned and to use cookie-stuffing responsibly.
Rule # 1. Stuff cookies that directly relate to your article or product review. There is no point stuffing a cookie that is for a mobile phone if your article is about lawn care.
Rule # 2. Only stuff cookies on a page for one affiliate network at a time. Treat the affiliate network with respect and abide by their terms and conditions.
If you do that you will be among the 1 or 2 percent of webmasters who actually care about their visitors rather than only caring about how many pennies they rake in each day. You will find that caring about your visitors and merchants, and treating them with respect will lead to much greater success and long-term income growth.
What cookie stuffer would I recommend? If you happen to run your online business using a Wordpress blog then consider the benefits of adding Affiliate Cookie Stuffer (direct link, no affiliate code stuffed here) to your marketing strategy. With quality content and solid visitor numbers, this cookie stuffing plugin really can put you in the top few percent of webmasters in your chosen niche.
