Affiliate Link Theft

Today I'm writing about the Internet Marketing phenomenon that I call the Affiliate Link "Sidestep".

Basically it's the process where you have advertised about a product and provided some information and an affiliate link for your list members to click on and hopefully purchase from you.

Now much has been said about the process of people STEALING your sales by hijacking your affiliate link, but this isn't what I'm talking about.

This is about people taking what information you provide and searching for the product site themselves, or another way would be to try and remove your affiliate information and using the main part of the url.

Someone might say that they aren't exactly "stealing" your sale proceeds, but in avoiding the use of your affiliate link to access the site or product, they are taking away from you that sale potential. In my book that's pretty darn close to stealing!

Read more here: affiliate-link-sidestep

FOOTNOTE:

I received a "warning" that my post was in danger of being disallowed as "too promotional, and too short for an outbound link". That proves one thing to me, whoever sent the message didn't read the post OR follow the link.

Short posts that get the idea across without useless blather are something I appreciate, and there were NO advertising links involved on the post OR on the site the link leads to (actually my marketing news and information blog), so this could HARDLY be seen as promotional in any way, and besides! It's my effin account profile.

The suggestion was that I add more content, and so here it is...

Hub Pages. Methinks you should get a REAL person to view the post before sending such a warning, or if you are using a real person..fire them and hire useful help!

Hopefully this additional content will now place this Hub Post in the "acceptable range" of posts, even though its actually my condemnation of your ridiculous "warning" to me.