Could someone steal my commission?

Hello guys,

I need an advice. I am not a real marketer, but I have one year old website that has some decent traffic. I've set up some ClickBank links in December and in January and February I had several sales that accumulated to 134$ commission without any effort on my part.

Now my last sale was in February 26 and since then all what I had was one refund I still send around 10-20 hops to the vendor's page every day. My ClickBank ID is there and I can't figure out what could be the reason why I am not having any sales. If this is going to continue for some time more CB will apply dormant account charges (can't take my check because I still didn't reach CDR).

I've heard there is a lot of dishonest people who abuse ClickBank system. Definitely something is going on there, because once I had a hop for a product I never promoted or created a hoplink for it. So my question is: could it be that someone is taking my commission although my CB ID is there? How you make sure that no one can steal your commission?

Thanks for taking time to read

 

Yes, hoplinks are hijacked and commission's are stolen all the time- you should consider cloaking your links.

 

Yeah as daniell mentioned, you should cloak your links. But from last few months Clickbank conversion rates seems dropping.. there are numerous complaints on various forums about sudden drop in sales.

 

Thanks a lot! I don't know much about cloaking, but what I've heard before it might hurt your rankings in search engines, because again, some people abused link cloaking for other purposes. Is there some safe way of link cloaking? Do you have a link to a resource where I could learn how to do this safely and that you could recommend?

I totally depend on search engine traffic and I can't risk it. Currently my site is 100% dependent on Google traffic and Adsense income. Any advice is appreciated, thanks

 

You could switch to adsense instead if you want

 

lol, I didn't quite get what you mean

Also, if I go and generate another hop link for the same product and replace my old hoplinks with this new one, will this resolve the issue at least temporarily?

 

You need to send more than 10-20 hops per day. Boost your traffic to 100-200 hops per day and I pretty much guarantee as long as the traffic is targeted, you will start making sales.

 

I just was wondering about it because I started making regular sales and then suddenly everything stopped. I mean there was a certain pattern already. Then unless I am sure I know how to protect my sales I am not so keen to send them more of my traffic.

 

Your commission isn't stolen! You're sending way too little traffic.

Sales can be often inconsistent, especially if you're making only 1 sale per day or less, you can easily go from 1 sale per day, from 0 sales per day. The target market and the product fluctuate with their pefromance, thus, a product might stop converting as well as it did before.These fluctuations are very normal.

What you need to do is drive more traffic.

 

Thanks Ripped, may be it's strange but this is what I wanted to hear...lol I just hope that this is the case. I wish I could know for sure though

 

I've worked with clickbank for around 3 years, both as an affiliate and as vendor. What happened to you, has happened to me, and many other affiliates numerous times, vendors as well.

I've had periods when I'd have 100+ sales per day consistently, and then, overnight, I'd suddenly drop to 50-60 sales per day , with the same targeted traffic, and without any logical explanation. So if I can drop from 100 sales per day, to 50 sales per day, imagine how easy it could be to drop from 5 sales per month, to 0 sales per month. It wouldn't be suprising if this happened.

My point is, this is something that happens all the time. I'm working with Clickbank, Plimus, CPA offers, and what has happened to you, occurs all the time and it could be attributed to numerous factors.
What you should do, is to keep working, keep driving traffic.

Also, you should diversify, meaning promote various products, so that your revenue doesn't depend on a single product, because if the product stops converting, you might be in trouble.

 

please tell me how to make 100+ sales a day. thx.

i seem to be able to drive decent traffic to make money with adsense and ebay... but clickbank has always been tough for me. i'd be happy with 1 sale per week.

i've been hit with the dormant account policy. i feel your pain.

 

Not the number of hops you get but the number of of people interested in your product really matters for you to make a sale. Wish u good luck.

 

Thank you very much. I actually made a sale day before yesterday, so I hope no one is stealing anything. I actually did replace some of my hoplinks with a new code, but still the chances are that it was bought from an old link. I want to thank everybody for support and advice

 

I just figured out how my comission can be stolen. Say you write an article and that article ranks first page for some high traffic site. Then The only one that can steal your commission is I think the article directory owner. Because he can easily manipulate the links to add his own affiliate ID. After that all the commission will go to his account. But I do not think hosting companies do that. I think they can but this is too bad for their name and they will not do that.

 

If that's the only way I have nothing to worry about. I don't do article marketing. But probably there are other ways too...

 

I had a similar problem but you can never know if you are getting just a few hops per day.

 

"Stealing" commissions is VERY difficult and VERY rare. Sometimes vendors "steal" potential commissions by replacing your tracking cookie when they send emails to their list, but even that is more dishonesty than outright theft.

 

Thanks dlm, I trust your experience. I am not very much into CB but just didn't like the idea of losing something I earned previously for having a dormant account. You made me change my mind, I won't remove Clickbank links from my site

 

Hi Ripped and CleverFoxy, may I know do you use any cloaking method to cloak your affiliate links?

I am considering to cloak my links but I wonder whether that helps, not mentioning it hurts the SEO effort.