Niche Affiliate Marketing

Nothing gets you more angry then some doosh-bag taking your landing pages and coping them word-to-word and starts running them beside your ads.

This happened to me recently. I came home from work one day and saw my eCPC dropped drastically. At first I didn’t know what happened. I literally froze for few seconds. I quickly fired up my browser, opened my YSM and adwords accounts to see what was going on. I saw nothing had changed from yesterday except the conversion rate, which had gone down dramatically. For the first time in 2 months after launching my campaign I was losing money. It just didn’t make sense. I knew something fishy was going on.

I saw one of my adgroups which had always performed well was doing really badly. I quickly went to Google ad-preview tool to see if my ads were running fine. What I discovered just blew me away…

I saw a similar ad above my ad worded almost exactly as mine with a similar looking domain name, only the order of the words changed. This was the highlight of my day. I don’t know how long this guy had been running his ads like this but it was really pissed off to see what I saw.

Next, I went to his site and just couldn’t believe what I discovered - this guys basically downloaded my landing pages and uploaded them on to his server under his domain. It was an exact copy! With exact keywords, ad-copies and landing pages as mine, this guy was taking a big chunk out my revenue. I was absolutely furious as I should be.

How I dealt with this cheapskate copycat affiliate?

So you ask, what do I do when someone steals my stuff? You simply report to your affiliate manager or the network right away. I called my AM @ Azoogle, had a chat about what was going on and sent him his domain name shortly after. My AM immediately shut his affiliate link and in few hours his ads were down.

Networks will work with you to rectify situations like these because they don’t want to lose your business. First of all, this is a fraud - someone copying your sites is the stupidest thing they can do. They are asking to be shut down. No affiliate is going sit ideally and let this happen and networks will take action.

You can also report them to Google. I didn’t have to do that in my case because he ads were taken down without me raising the issue to Google. But I would imagine they will also take this seriously and shut his ads down.

How to prevent yourself being copied?

Apparently copying and stealing stuff outright is very common in the affiliate world but I think you can take few steps to prevent this to happen to yourself…

1. Don’t append keywords to your landing pages. In another word, don’t use PHP conversion tracking where you append the keywords to your URL using PHP code for tracking purposes. Instead use keyword pixel tracking. It’s fast, efficient and safe.

2. Avoid naming your images same as your keywords you’re bidding on. I can run a keyword search say “online dating sites” on http://images.google.com and get links to literally 1000s of landing pages. Your landing pages are sensitive data. Don’t let other affiliates see that.

3. Lastly, don’t share any info regarding your niche, keywords or domain names with anyone out there. Once they discover your secrets, this will simply copy you word-to-word. Why not? Less work for them. Right?

So protect your work. When you do catch someone taking your stuff, report them to your affiliate manager and your network right away.