Work At Home Careers

Because of my recent article on cloaking affiliate links using .htaccess, I’ve been getting quite a few requests for information on how to stuff affiliate cookies. Cookie stuffing is bad! Or so I hear. There may very well be times when it is acceptable to stuff affiliate cookies such as when you have permission from a vendor. So here’s how to do it.

And, I’m going to assume that you are about to mail your huge list of 10,000 prospects and want to get paid for those efforts so you’ve talked to the vendor and he says, “heck yeah, stuff those cookies. I want to make sure you get credit for all the sales you send”.

There are several ways to do it, this is just one of them.

Create a folder and name it something that makes sense and sounds innocent.

For this example, I’ll use adcounter.

Paste this code into a text file and save as .htaccess , upload to the adcounter folder (or which ever folder you create)

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule (.+)/(.+).gif http://YOUR-ID.$1.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=$2 [R,L]

Now, paste this code into your webpage

<img src=”http://yourdomain.com/adcounter/VENDOR/TID.gif” width=”1″ height=”1″ border=”0″ alt=” ” />

The TID is the extra word that can be tracked so you know where your sales came from when viewing your clickbank sales transactions and will display on the clickbank order page along with your affiliate id.

If your not familiar with using the TID field when generating your clickbank links, just use a benign word like “count”. This way you’ll know which sales came from the stuffed cookies.

It would be best to drop this code into your page right next to an existing banner if there is one or another image if not. Someone looking at the source code for your page would more than likely assume that this was just an image used to track banner displays. If you’ve used links from CJ then you’ve already seen the 1×1 images in the code they use for tracking.

Ok, so what about stuffing other affiliate cookies besides Clickbank?

So we’ll create another folder and this time I’ll use countview.

Open up a text editor and paste the following code into it and save it as .htaccess , upload it to the countview folder (or which ever folder you create). Change the links first!

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule product1.gif http://vendor1.com [R,L]
RewriteRule product2.gif http://vendor2.com [R,L]

When you want to drop a cookie, just add a new line

<img src=”http://yourdomain.com/countview/product1.gif” width=”1″ height=”1″ border=”0″ alt=” ” />

For an example, let’s say I was wanting to drop a cookie for SurveyKing, I would add the following line to my .htaccess file.

RewriteRule surveyking.gif http://trafficpayouts.com/affiliate-link [R,L]

I would then use the following image code on the page I wanted to stuff the affiliate cookie.

<img src=”http://yourdomain.com/countview/surveyking.gif” width=”1″ height=”1″ border=”0″ alt=” ” />

You just match the .gif name with the .gif name in the .htaccess file and tell it where to send it. Add as many lines as you want.

Again, I’m providing this example of affiliate cookie stuffing with the belief that it will be used only where allowed. Many merchant companies have strict policies against cookie stuffing and may terminate your affiliate counts and in some cases, may even take you to court.

On the other hand, if you are mailing a huge subcriber list or starting an expensive pay per click or other kind of paid advertising campaign, you want to get paid. It’s important that you receive all credit from the sales you generate. Talking with the vendors you wish to promote in advance may clear the path for setting some cookies. They may even be willing to set you up with your own private landing pages to send traffic to. I’ve worked out those type of arrangements myself with Clickbank vendors before so I know it can happen.

Till next time,
Gail

P.S. Don’t stuff all the cookies, be sure and leave a few for Santa!