Protecting Your Web Business and your Bottom Line
The task of protecting the fruits of our labour on-line today is not anything like as easy as it once used to be.
This is particularly so for the small business or individual entrepreneur, trying to establish a productive on-line business.Many make an initial start by promoting the products of others through the application of affiliate marketing, receiving commissions that vary over a range of 20% to as high as 70% in some instances.
To achieve a meaningful income requires tenacity and hard work, but with careful planning and a good work ethic the results achieved by many can be quite impressive.
Like any business venture, on-line marketing has its risks, risks that are not part of your business efforts but more to do with the efforts of others whose aim is to sideline income that is rightfully yours, into their own pockets.
In other words marketers and on-line businesses in general have their share of thieves just like any bricks and mortar business.
So, how do they go about it and what sort of activities are involved?
The marketing of other peoples products be they direct to company or through an on-line retailer such as click bank, necessarily means you generating traffic that is sent in an identifiable way to your business partner and in virtually all cases this involves attaching an i.d. or affiliate reference to the link that your visitor follows.
The problem with this approach predominantly rests with the fact that such links are easy to hijack and alter (to reflect the i.d. of a third party) and thereby deny you your commission.
However, this is just one drain upon your business effort, there are quite a few more.
Another results from the consumption of a precious resource – your time which in affiliate marketing is precious indeed.
One of the essential facets of doing business on-line is the need to make available to your visitors a means of contacting you and naturally the preferred method is email.
So you create an email account along the lines of customer_service@somedomain.com and in a surprisingly short time the email inbox is receiving considerably more spam rather than genuine customer enquiries, thanks to email harvesting.
The time it takes to process and filter out the good stuff from the garbage is a clear cost to your business, one you could well do without.
The disruptive activities of others goes well beyond those mentioned thus far however.
One of the early additions to a typical affiliate marketing business involves the placement of a form (or forms) aimed at gathering information from site visitors which may take the form of a subscription to a newsletter, a visitor survey or even post sales support resource.
These forms are an easy target for some and in ways not often appreciated by many marketers.
You will often hear the term “the money is in the list” which to a large extent is indeed quite true. The phrase is really driving at the lifetime value of a customer and the potential for repeat sales.
So, what if that list gets stolen, exploited and therefore devalued? what if the web server script that handles the forms data is exploited by others? This does happen and far more frequently than you may have thought.
Once you have gained the prospect/customer you will want to keep them, perhaps by providing specially written reports – reports that have value to your list. It is important to put in place some method of data protection so that when someone posts the link to your resources (believe me they will – eventually) you do not suddenly have your material made available to all and sundry. After all that was never the intention of creating those reports in the first place.
So how do you counter such activities?
There are a number of approaches to adopt ranging from do-it-yourself coding (assuming you have the necessary skills and TIME).
Then there are a number of on-line tools aimed at protecting links etc and these are fine but often represent only a partial solution to the problems discussed.
There are some FREE utilities available too – here you generally get what you pay for, often with none existent support.
The real issue however is your time and level of experience both of which impact the bottom line when it comes to implementing even basic protection.
I came across a site that will provide you with additional information and some quite good demonstration videos that help further explain what can be done to eliminate the problems discussed.
What is particularly interesting is the range of protection and ease of installation, particularly for those of us that are not technically advanced.
The single overall solution to which I refer is a product called linkmaster.
I bought it and was surprised to find that It took me (a relative novice) less than 5 minutes to install, it is easy to use and I found the video presentations especially helpful.
On the one occasion I have needed support, I found them to be responsive, helpful and able to solve my issue very promptly indeed.
Now my on-line business is effectively protected.
You can learn more about the breadth of solutions available which include link cloaking, domain locking, email cloaking, forms management and digital asset protection by visiting http://yourlinkmaster.com
JJ Cooper
Author of ‘Anger Management – Regaining Control Of Your Life‘
