You’re watching your competitors, which means they are watching you! In this article we’ll show you how to hide as much about your business as possible.
Running the right campaign and having the perfect set of banners, prelanders and landing pages takes a lot of time, effort and skill but, in the end, it can bring you a lot of money. When you finally find the recipe for success you need to keep it protected so that others don’t use it to steal your customers. There are several ways to do this. The first is by taking your property offline.
Offline vs Online
It is much easier to protect your intellectual property in an offline business. You have laws, patents and places you can go to when people steal from you. When you hit the sweet spot with your campaign and money starts rolling in, you’ll probably find your prized landing pages all over the internet and there’ll be very little you can do about it. However, there are ways to better protect yourself.
Be a ninja and lay low
When you make money, don’t tell everybody about it. Don’t be the flashy idiot who boasts about his new found wealth. There are a lot of them out there and it’s tempting to follow suit but, don’t. All you’re doing is pointing a huge sign at your business saying ‘Steal This’.
When you do things properly and money comes your way, you’re going to want to keep it that way as long as possible. If you tell everybody about your tweaks, blacklists, best account managers, small networks with great traffic that works for nutra in Italy then you will lose the edge and people will figure out what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. Work on the network of people you know and make sure you only share your secrets with the people who will give something in return. Also, try not to spill your secrets out when you get drunk at a conference, its not easy but be aware that every conference has vultures just waiting to feast on your ideas.
Privacy please
There are tons of spying tools out there that people in the industry use to spy on you. Here are 7 ways to protect yourself against thieves.
Cloak your websites. You can do this by showing different content to people visiting from countries which you don’t target.
Show different content when people go to the url without a specific parameter you have in your tracking.
Hash your subIDs. Do not use &source=popmobile_male_iphone_germany. Really, don’t do it!
Encrypt your pages, disable copying text from the websites and disable robots.txt if you don’t use SEO. Doing this will stop less experienced affiliates stealing from you.
If you find someone has stolen your work, then tell your lawyer to scare them a bit with an email to the network who ripped you off and try to convince them to take it down. It will not work every time but you might get lucky.
Be smart and cover your tracks. In the end, we all want to make money. If you find something interesting online, try to think about how you would prevent yourself from finding it and then implement those measures in your campaigns.
Last but not least: don’t steal people’s content directly! If you find something that works, recreate it and make sure it’s different. It’s ok to steal ideas, just don’t steal content. If you’re not creative then get someone who is, it’s worth the money as they will be better able to convince people to get you those all important conversions.
For more information on how to get the right people helping you, check out our article on How to Build Your Dream Team.