Affiliate programs have been around in some shape or form for many years. The problems that plague the only versions of these programs is nothing less than theft. So, let's dig a little deeper to see exactly what is going on with these programs.

If you have visited any website you will notice when you mouse-over a link you can see the path to the link in the status bar. Link theives will take your affiliate links and replace them with their name and then purchase the products (getting a discount at your expense). In addition, some clever thieves will download spyware onto a host machine and when they click an affiliate link they will redirect it to their affiliate account.

To protect yourself you can use a technique called cloaking. With this technique you take your affiliate links run them through a cloaking program which changes the link to something else usually a much smaller link. The cloaking service will redirect the cloaked links to your affiliate programs when they are used, see below for an example.

You have a link of: http://myaffiliatelink.com/?makingmoney=me&howmuch=millions

Cloaked link could be: http://notionsinc.com/ntirMakingmoney (another benefit of cloaking is the link is usually much smaller)

If this link is stolen you will still get the money because the cloaking service is going to redirect the user to the link that was setup in the first place. Notions, Inc. feels so strongly about affiliate link theft that we have just implemented a cloaking service for you to use FOR FREE! All you have to do is click this link here http://www.notionsinc.com/cloaker.aspx.