Underground Affiliate Marketing Technique

One of my favorite new affiliate marketing techniques is really, really simple yet quite powerful. Let me ask you a question ñ how do you feel when you see a link like this inside an email you get promoting a product? www.affiilateprogram.com/?imakecommissionfromu 

You know right away the guy or gal is making an affiliate commission, right? Of course, and on a logical level you know itís fine, but emotionally you donít like it. Even URLs that are redirects or those little shortened URLs ñ thereís something a little off about it. 
Well Iíve been seeing some good results taking a different approach. Iíve been buying my own domain to promote affiliate programs I really believe in and doing the same for my top affiliate partners. 
Letís start from the standpoint that youíre the affiliate promoting a product. Iíll give you a quick example of how easy this is. Inside the revision of "33 Days To Online Profits" 2005 edition, Jim Edwards and I made one little change. For the last few years weíve recommended a registrar for domain names and just had a link inside the PDF to the website (it was a cloaked link that said something like "recommended registrar"). We never really made much commission 
from that affiliate link even though people reading this work really needed to buy new domains (in most cases). But this year we did something different. I signed us up at www.WildWestDomains.com to become a reseller for GoDaddy. Then instead of just putting in our extra long link from Wild West ñ I bought us another domain name. We are the proud owners of 
www.UltimateDiscountDomains.com. Inside the "33 Days" book we reference UltimateDiscountDomains.com as our recommended source and weíve been getting a steady $75 to $150 a month in commission checks from them. Iím not going to retire on that, but it illustrates the big difference from using this technique. 
Hereís a couple things that I believe make it work. 
1. People would rather click on just the domain name itself. Anything that smells like an affiliate link isnít going to work as well as a naked URL.
2. The domain name has a benefit to it. Iím a strong believer in making the URL have a distinct benefit to people as soon as they read it. A perfect example is my InstantSalesLetters.com site ñ you know what the benefit is when you hear the domain. A good way to get a domain that is still available is to add some kind of prefix, such as "instant," "ultimate," "mega," or "super."
3. Itís a dot-com. Iím not a huge fan of buying .net and .org names. I still think the king of the hill is dot-com. Now Iím not saying there isnít a place for those other names (like blocking competitors and preventing rip-offs) but for me ñ dot.com is the way to go.
--Side Note: The reason our affiliate link inside this ebook producea sales is that we make a point of recommending it specifically as a resource for readers. Itís not just an aside but integrated into the content.--
Okay now letís turn the tables and look at this technique from the merchant's point of viewÖ
If you want to do something special for your top affiliate/JV partners ñ buy them their own domain name. For instance, I own about 25 different variations on www.UltimateCopywritingWorkshop.com (thatís the main domain for my huge Internet copywriting course). Then I registered top affiliates domains like UltimateCopyWorkshop.com, MegaCopywritingWorkshop.com, UltimateCopyManual.com, and so on. 
Each of these could easily be the "main" domain for a product, so they are very good domains. Now behind-the-scenes to make this work I simply set upa redirect inside my control panel for each domain name. You know itís really simple if I can do it! That means I didnít need to get hosting set up for each of these domains. I simply redirected or forwarded their new domain to what the partnerís affiliate link is (for instance www.UltimateCopywritingWorkshop.com/?12345) 
Hereís what else is great from your affiliates' standpoint (aside from what we covered originally):
1. You care. Youíve taken the time to register them a domain. And reciprocation also kicks in, so they feel more inspired to promote your products.
2. They can easily use the domain during interviews, in articles, on their websites, etc. without it appearing like an overt pitch.
Last point on this is that you control the domain.If an affiliate isnít producing or never promoted your product, you can yank the domain from them. Fear is a huge motivator, so if you even mentioned you might need to re-assign their domain since they havenít done anything with it ñ it would get a lot of your partners promoting.
Iím using a variation of technique to run Danís affiliate program for the Gold membership. 
This time we are not giving each affiliate their own domain, but weíve set up each of our partners with their own sub-domain name like www.dk3monthspecial.com/trial/ or www.dk3monthspecial.com/freebie/. Youíll notice each of sub-domains is a word that actually makes sense and not an affiliate id#. We also did the same thing for big promotion periods with sub-domains like this: www.yourvalentinesgift.com/frompaul/ 
Frankly, my affiliate program is the single biggest traffic and profit-generation source I use in my business and anything you can to make your product stand out ñ the better youíll do. I have a friend who was in the adult Internet world and they are the savviest Internet marketers I know. He would actually set up an entire site for a top partner. It would have not only a whole different domain name, but it would have a different look and feel than the main companyís site. It was almost like a private label version but the parent company controlled it for the affiliate. He said this was one of the highest producing techniques he used.
Now that youíve seen how powerful this is ñ thereís only thing left to do ñ go buy some more domains. Thereís a spot I know where you can find them. 
==========================================================Yanik Silver is recognized as the leading expert on creating automatic, moneymaking websites...and he stilldoesn't know how to put up a website. 
He is the author, co-author or creator of several best-selling online marketing books and tools, including hisnewest resource - http://www.UltimateCopywritingWorkshop.com==========================================================