I went to the Webmaster World conference in Boston, normally good stuff, this year it wasn't so great. However I did pick up a little potential gem, I don't mind sharing the wealth www.linkconnector.com It's a affiliate scheme with a difference. Instead of an affiliate linking to your site with affiliatenetwork.com/?code=r32req423 they actually link directly to your site, no referer codes, no nothing. It's a straight link! Imagine you get 100,000 affiliates? All linking directly to you? I've always been scared of affiliate programs due to large setup costs, but this is where i was impressed, the setup is $200 and that money goes into a pot to pay your affiliates. Note, this is what the lady on the exhibition stand told me. I'm not affiliated with this company, I'm going to check it out properly and signup etc when I get back to the UK. I thought I'd share this because it sounds excellant. Hope it works out for you guys, let me know your comments.
You can get the same credit just by 301 redirecting all your affiliate links to your homepage after the cookie is set. I had a read of the site and couldn't figure out how they are going to track the affiliates? Will it be by the referrer headers or a cookie trackable across both sites and set with an onclick event when the user clicks the affiliate link?
Well I'm unsure, as most link to the affiliate network site with a code....not your site as they have to track it. That was also my concern, from an affiliate pov. The lady i spoke with wasn't too technical but I will pose the question.
I suppose - my affiliate programs are always custom made and don't involve a 3rd party network. I've seen people use referrer headers before but with programs like Norton blocking them on thousands of PC's its just not going to work.
I have a merchant account using LinkConnector. Does anyone here want to help me test if Google really counts the affiliate links via linkconnector as natural links or google ignores them.