Here is an “Grey Hat” Affiliate Marketing tactic that has been getting a lot of Buzz recently. I noticed John Chow wrote about this on his blog today, I thought is was worth a mention.

By now you should know, Affiliate Marketing is simply the process of driving traffic (buyers) to a merchant web site, through your Affiliate Link. If a sale is made, You Get Paid, a percentage of the sale. Once they click your affiliate link a Cookie is set, and even if the visitor doesn’t buy buy right away, you still get credit for the sale if they come back and buy before the cookie expires. Affiliate Programs typically set a 30 to 90 day cookie.

Cookie Stuffing is a ‘trick’ affiliates use to increase the amount of commisions they’re paid from advertisers by dropping their cookie on the unsuspecting buyer.

There are different ways that affiliates can effectively stuff cookies, and some are considered acceptable by affiliate programs, while others are off limits (Black Hat).

Stuffing With I-Frames

Chow explains: “An IFrame allows you to embed another HTML page inside the current webpage. What you do is load the affiliate page into your current page with an IFrame but make the IFrame so small that the readers can’t see it.”

Sounds simple enough, basically you set up an IFRAME code to feature your affiliate links as 1×1 pixels. Now when visitors hit your site, they get cookied by the affiliate program in the IFRAME without ever noticing a thing.

Here is an example of the code:

<iframe src=”http://your-affiliate-url.com” width=”1″ height=”1″
frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”no”></iframe>

Other methods of Cookie Stuffing using Pop-Ups and Pop-Unders. These are generally considered to be acceptable forms of marketing, Stuffing cookies on an unsuspecting user is still a little Grey Hat!

While I don’t recommend this as an Internet Marketing Strategy, check with the TOS of your Affiliate program and make sure you are not in violation using these techniques.

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