Posted by Ray White on January 24, 2010 Comments (1)

I understand that affiliate links can be “stolen” meaning that credit for the sale can be misdirected. So people want to use “cloaking links” or “url shorteners” to “protect” their affiliate links. You, the affiliate marketer, wants due credit for your promotional efforts. Commissions are the bottom line, I get that. What I don’t get is why use someone else’s domain when you can use your own?

You can register your own domain for under $10 a year. You can use your domain to house your unique splash pages for your affiliate programs. Your affiliate link will then be a link on the page, hidden in the HTML code. May not totally prevent commission theft, but thieves tend to go for what’s easy and this puts an extra step in the way. Besides, you can make your own squeeze pages to build your own email marketing list from your promotional efforts and put them on your domain, too. Having your own domain gives you so many options with your marketing.

When you use a domain that is not your own, you lose control over your links. If the domain goes down, so does your campaign and you can’t do a darn thing about it except wait. With your own domain, you can notify your hosting company immediately and get back up and running as soon as you know your domain goes down.

Just an opinion. Am I missing something?