How to protect Landing pages and get FREE conversions from the thieves
Virgil from AffKit.com here. We just released a new awesome tool on AffKit(which you can access for free as a Dojo member) and I want to tell you more about it and guide you on how to use it. I'm very proud about this tool because I couldn't find anything similar on the web, free or paid, and what it achieves is pretty awesome considering how huge and delicate the problem is. This would bring you extra conversions for free from the thieves who steal your landing pages, or will just make them stop using the LP by themselves, without you forcing them in any way.
Protect you Lander
To see how important this is, before going further, I just want to say that a friend who recently got his adult LP stolen(and convinced me to make this tool), by his calculation, this tool would have brought him 2x -3x times the Dojo price EXTRA profit per DAY... no messing around. The thief was a big fish used with stealing entire pages by copy-paste and by redirecting just 30% of his traffic would have brought my mate this nice amount extra cash for free. Make a calculation how much this tool is worth...and you get it for free inside the Dojo
So is this guide/tool for you or not?
This guide and tool is mostly for the ones who are dealing with landing pages, but even if you currently don't use LPs, in the near future you probably will, so it's better to keep reading and be aware about this threat and how to protect from it when it's needed.
Landing page stealing is one of the most frustrating aspect on affiliate marketing, because it happens so often and there is no real way to stop it. You are spending money and time to optimize a LP and suddenly you see it all over the spy tool. That's when you know why the costs got higher and ROI decreased. A few thieves are enough on a small niche to outbid you. So not only that your work gets stolen, but your campaign will also die...it's a nightmare and it happens all the time.
Unfortunately there is no real, 100% protection from this. Taking legal action? No way, doesn't worth it. Protecting from thieves' eyes? Not really, if the LP is available for public, thieves can see it and can make another one the same. Spy tools can be stopped? Not at all. They are smart enough to act like a normal visitor on the page. The ip blocking protection doesn't work since they change the proxy IPs very often.
What's the solution then?
The biggest advantage we have over thieves is that most of them are lazy and instead creating a new design by themselves, they copy-paste the source-code or saves the entire page. For the ones who create from scratch the same LP design and content, you can't do anything about, but many steal because they are inexperienced and it's simply much easier.
There are a few traditional ways to protect from viewing the source, but they are effective only for noobs, the browsers reveal everything and they can only be stopped temporary. If it happens to know about Developer tools, View source and Save page as from Browser's menu, you can't do anything about it. You can read more about these techniques on my blog post.
Instead of trying to hide the source, let's take another approach and let the thief steal the entire page, just like it is. Once the page is uploaded on the thief's server, with some scripts hidden inside the page we can take full control over his traffic. So instead of getting mad, you can take advantage of the whole situation and start sending FREE traffic and FREE conversions from the stolen LP. How cool is that?
The new AffKit tool implements a very smart way of getting traffic back, without the thief knowing that. For him it shows just low CTR and eventually will think the landing page is not good
and he'll take it down by himself. It's pretty smart, isn't it?The Landing Page Protection tool hides the redirection code inside a non-harmful, non-detectable script that's injected on the LP. It uses a clever method to drive only the "good" traffic, the visitors that already clicked on the Call to Action, sending them directly to your offer instead of thief's offer...so you'll get free conversions from his traffic. You can also set what percent of the traffic you want to redirect from the thief. If it has very high traffic you may want to send a lower percent so he won't get suspicious, but you can also set to redierct a higher percent, making him think the page is worthless. Another great stuff is that you can use a tracking link so you'll know how much traffic/conversions you get from the stolen pages and the thief won't know, only if he changes the offer.
Below is a walk-trough of how to use this tool. Even if your LP is new and you are working on optimizing it, you can still use this tool. Just make variations of the patched landing page and don't touch the javascript.
Step A
Go to AffKit.com > Landing page protection
Step B
Complete the next steps as you see in the image below(more details below the image):
For step 1) Set the domain where the landing page is hosted. If the link to your LP is http://www.mydomain.com/landingpage1.html use www.mydomain.com
For step 2) Open you landing page with notepad or your normal text editor. Search for the Call To Action button, the one that has your affiliate or tracking link. It needs to be inside the <a> </a> tag, something like <a href="your link"> an image tag or text</a>. Once you find the <a> tag with your affiliate/tracking link add a custom id, it should be something like <a id="call-to-action" href="your link">an image tag or text</a> . Save the page than put the custom id set earlier on the corresponding field inside the tool.
For step 3) Get the offer's affiliate link from the tracking(if you have one) and paste it on that field OR just copy the affiliate/tracking link from call to action you edited on step above. If you know how to work with sub-ids, set one, like in the image, to track the traffic from stolen page. NOTE: this should be the direct link to the offer, not to your LP or other offer that is not related to the page, otherwise it won't convert.
For step 4) Set the amount of traffic you want to redirect to your offer. Check the note on the tool to know what amount to set.
Step C
On 'Use source-code encryption' select the option 'No encryption' . The other protection methods are up to you if you want to use or not.
Step D
Click 'Next' than click on the 'Choose file' button and select the page you saved earlier. After the select dialog closes you can click the 'Download' button to grab the patched version with the protection script hidden inside your LP.
Upload your LP on the server, test... and that's all
Note: if you are changing the offer or domain that hosts the page, you need to use the tool again with the new variables and patch the initial page source(the one un-patched) again.
I'm hoping you'll put this guide into practice and start protecting your LPs from thieves ASAP, you'll thank me later
Cheers,
Virgil
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