Don't worry, you are not getting ripped off by the companies whose affiliate programs you belong too. As long as they pay you the money you earned, and pay you on time, then you have nothing to worry about with them.

What I'm talking about here are the unscrupulous, sneaky, "petty shoplifter" customers who are taking your hard-earned commissions from right under your nose and out of your pocket... and putting that money into THEIR pockets!

Again, I am not talking here about the professional thief. I am talking about the person who thinks, "Oh great, I think I'll save myself $15.00, $30.00 or more. Why should I give that money to John or Janet (even though they did the work to tell me about the product in the first place) when I can simply plug in my own affiliate ID instead".

Of course, the thieves don't have to be an affiliate themselves; there are quite a few savvy people out on the Internet who are just ordinary Joes. These ordinary Joes know what an affiliate link looks like in the address bar and so just tend to erase everything after the main web address and go to the site directly.

By now, you can see how you could be losing hundreds or even thousands of dollars every year due to affiliate link hijackers and people that just simple bypasses your affiliate links.

However, all is not lost as you can easily protect your income from the thieves. As you may or may not be aware there are a few alternatives. You can purchase outright, software that will cloak your links that is very easy to use and can be used over and over again on numerous web sites and affiliate links. Secondly you can subscribe to one or two of the companies that are around that charge you an ongoing monthly fee. You usually find that you can add any amount of affiliate links for cloaking but only associate it with one main URL address, so if you have several web sites promoting different programs, it could become quite a monthly figure that you are paying out. And lastly, you could do absolutely nothing and just keep on losing your hard earned money to the thieves. In which case you are obviously making too much money and can afford to give it away!

Therefore I strongly suggest that if you are an affiliate promoting other's products, to further explore the possibility of disguising your affiliate links and make even MORE MONEY.