Interesting little plugin for WordPress (and just $8 at the moment).. it allows you to link to an affiliate offer in a post or page, but the link is a direct link to the merchant, not a weird looking affiliate link.
This tool essentially allows you to prevent people from stripping your affiliate ID from the link (and sometimes using their own instead) or just clearing their cookies because they feel like being mean and not let you get a commission from the sale (or lead or whatever).
The tool will silently plant the cookie in the background when the page is viewed so the visitor never thinks of clearing it. To them, the link is a direct link, and I’m not talking about some JavaScript trick to make it seem like a direct link in the status bar, it’s a true direct link. Of course this only works with affiliate offers that use the cookie system but the majority of them do.
Now, you still will want to display somewhere on your site that you might be making commissions for link, product, service and people referrals or whatever text you want to use to be compliant.
Also.. you may want to check with the terms of the affiliate offer to be sure it’s ok to plant a cookie prior to a click. I’m guessing most won’t care.
June 2, 2010
Miscellaneous