Ethical Affiliate Marketing: Don’t Cookie Stuff!

If you want to make fast cash once, be an unethical affiliate marketer. Lie and cheat your way to money. However, if you want to make a lot of money over and over again; practice ethical affiliate marketing. Don’t be a cookie stuffer!

What Is Cookie Stuffing?

Also goes by the term force click. Cookie stuffing is an unethical affiliate behavoir and many affiliate programs now incorporate this into their terms of use. If a merchant determines you practice cookie stuffing, you can be booted out of the program altogether. If it’s a high paying gig, you lose big time.

What is being described is the practice of automatically simulating a physical click of an affiliate link. Cookie stuffing is commonly used to describe a simulated click happening on a web site versus a simulated click happening through adware. Occasionally people will use the term in conjunction with adware.

When a simulated click of an affiliate link occurs, the clickstream happens as it normally would if a real person had physically clicked the link. The affiliate link is sent to the respective Network (or Merchant in the case of an in-house program) servers, the click is recorded and tracking cookies are placed on the end user’s computer. Hence the term cookie stuffing since in many cases the most obvious sign that something has happened is the appearance of the tracking cookie(s) on the computer.

There are many ways to technically automate or simulate a physical click of an affiliate link. The term cookie stuffing generally encompasses any of the various ways of achieving a simulated click of an affiliate link.

My simple practice is this; operate your affiliate business with the utmost integrity and ethical behavoir. You can make a serious amount of money with the right program and marketing. This should be treated as a real and viable business venture on your part.

You wouldn’t want your brick and mortar business succumbing to scams right? You would want real, live and breathing customers. Treat your affiliate marketing business the same.