Going Pseudo-Direct

Anyone who’s read Diorex’s Affiliate Playbook knows that one of the goals to aim for in affiliate marketing is a direct-to-merchant relationship. This allows you to work directly with the merchant who’s offer you are promoting and cutting out the network middle man altogether, equating to higher payouts and more transparency.

For new affiliates or affiliates pushing moderate volume and lead quality, this is most likely out of the question until you prove yourself. Or is it?

While doing some research on a few payday offers, I was checking out an offer run on CX digital (awesome affiliate network for anyone looking for some quality offers). The particular offer that I looked at is Accelerated Payday. Nothing stellar…however theres a few things to take away from this offer. The first is the redirect path. If you look at the status bar, or use LiveHTTPHeaders for Firefox or some other redirect following tool, you’ll see that your browser goes to incentaclick.com 0> adiclicks.com 0> acceleratedpayday.com. The adiclicks.com intermediate tracking url is what we want to look for. In this case (and most of the time), this tells us that our traffic is being forwarded through another network/advertiser in addition to incentaclick. Looking at the AcceleratedPayday page, we see a link at the footer to Affiliate Program which takes us to Commission Wizard which, sure enough, is another affiliate network. So not only is Incentaclick taking a cut of the original lead cost, but Commission Wizard is well. Moreover, we can safely assume that Incentaclick is simply another affiliate on the CW network and is getting a payout greater than they are offering us so that they can turn a profit. Thus we can go ‘pseudo-direct’ (lame term but it gets the point across) by simply signing up for commission wizard and running the offer through them. This will allow us to get closer and closer to the end merchant, cut more middleman out of the process, and make more money on our leads.

But what if the landing page doesn’t have a link to the parent affiliate company on it? Well, a lot of times, you can simply enter the redirect url (adiclicks.com) into google and it will give you the company that the tracking url belongs to. Another option is to put the tracking url into MyIPNeighbors and you will see some of the other sites on the IP address…this will more often than not have the affiliate networks page on it as well as a slew of other offers that this network runs. If nothing turns out at first with MYIPNeighbors, try incrementing the last octet of the ip address (if adiclicks resolves to 64.71.230.66, try 64.71.230.67, 64.71.230.68, etc). A lot of times networks own larger blocks of IP addresses so with a little snooping you can weed them out.

There are TONS of these offers out there across all of the networks. If you’re doing decent volume on an offer, but not enough to get the attention of the end merchant, see if there is a way for you to get closer to the merchant by chopping out some of the intermediary networks. Lots of times, you can get a few bucks more on your leads by signing up for another network and swapping out your affiliate links