One thing that really ruins my day is when I have an affiliate commission hijacked. Here’s how I find out about it. I will get a notification email from the vendor of the product I am promoting congratulating me on making a sale.

I log into my affiliate account, and sure enough, there in black and white is the information showing me that I made a sale, and how much commission I earned.

So I go to ClickBank and log into my account. But for some reason, there is no record of a sale. No problem. Maybe the sale hasn’t shown up in my stats yet. So I wait a day and check again. Still no sale recorded. A day later and still nothing.

I contact the support team at the affiliate area of the product I am promoting and ask how come my stats show a sale, yet there is no record of it with ClickBank.

I get a polite response telling me that this sometimes happens, and that it’s true that a sale was made, it’s likely that what happened was that the buyer inserted his/her affiliate link in before hitting the payment page. And there is nothing they could do.

I accept that. I can’t change the fact that there are people out there who will keep affiliates from getting paid. But I sure am going to do my best to make it harder for them.

After all, the only way to get clicks to the product site is to get traffic to my link. And getting eyeballs on that link costs time and money.

If all I do is put up an article with a link up on my site, I still have to pay for the domain name and hosting. If I use PPC, classified ads, or ezine ads, I am paying to get the clicks.

What I’ve decided to do is test using redirect pages for my links. I’m also going to cloak some of my links using Affiliate Defender.

With the redirect pages, I can create a page, put it on my site with any name I want, and have it send the visitor to the vendor’s site automatically without the visitor ever seeing the link. If I want to send people to Yahoo, I can make a redirect page called yahoo.html. My link can be mysite.com/yahoo.html. When someone clicks on it, they are sent to Yahoo.

I also purchased a piece of software called Affiliate Defender. It will take an affiliate link and create the code and a web page for that code that can’t be read. Someone can view the source of your page and be unable to figure out your affiliate link.

Redirect pages are easy to create, and you can find easy to follow instructions on how to do it by doing a search online. You won’t have to pay a cent for this information. If you would rather use a piece of software, Affiliate Defender is pretty reasonable.

I can’t protect all of my commissions. If someone is determined to buy products with their own links, I can’t stop them. But I can make it more difficult. Bottom line – If someone is going to get a commission by clicking on my link, it ought to be me!