So you bust your butt for months and finally find a hot market and you’ve actually build a kick ass landing page/site that converts better than the merchant site.
You’re as happy as can be, raking in $350/day profit, then you discover some loser has not only ripped off your site, page for page, but is copying your Google ad and is bidding above you! Now you’re mad as hell, blowing smoke.
Ever happen to you?
It’s happened to me a couple times, and yes I was mad has hell!
Now if someone copies your site exactly, including your google ads, you can usually contact the affiliate manager and they’ll put a stop to it. In most cases the culprit will only change things around a little bit – they’re still ripping you off!
So how do you deal with affiliate rip off artists?
The best way to combat these losers is to have a killer system for continual improvement for your affiliate business, that should include :
- Continually Split Testing Your Landing Page Copy and Google Ad Copy
- Regularly Adding more and more Keywords to Your Campaigns
- Systematically Adjusting and Optimizing Your Keyword Bids
- Building Out a Substantial Value Added Site around Your Affiliate Offer
What you need to understand is that a copy cat affiliate is only copying a single snap shot in time of your site and campaign.
They can’t copy your system!
Think about it..
It’s unlikely they captured how you segmented your keywords and structured your campaigns, and even the most sophisticated scraping tool won’t get all your keywords.
Chances are the copycat will only make a small fraction of the profit you’re making, if any, since they really don’t understand what they’re doing.
Having a solid system for continually improvement is the only true competitive advantage in affiliate marketing and the best way to protect yourself against rip off artists.
There also one other big element that an affiliate copycat can never copy : your mindset and decision making process.
Without the right system, and the right mindset and decision making process to execute that system, no rip off artist can ever truly copy your affiliate campaigns. As long as you have a solid system in place and know what you’re actually doing.
Also ,Check out this awesome post Kirsty did about this same topic.
affiliate competitive advantage affiliate continual improvement affiliate copycat affiliate rip off artist ripping off your site
interesting what niche?
haha
Weak, lazy, no creativity, affiliates…
It’s really messed up that people do that. One of the best ways to combat thieves is to rank my sites on the SERPS. If they steal others’ work on the organics, they will definitely get nuked for duplicated content especially if they steal from sites of authority. Besides, people that steal don’t survive doing SEO because it’s competitive and it takes some creativity to get certain sites to rank.
Giovanna, I totally agree with you. That’s why some times I hate that. Amit, even if you have a system if that lazy affiliate catch you again (and they will) they will copy again and again. If you see in another perspective they are masters in copying and finding the way to be more profitable just copying your work. Getting at top of the SERPS is the way to go and then let them copy you and see if search engines (Specially Google) will slap in their…
A whole slew of software is dedicated to doing this. And sites like KeywordSpy thrive on copycats. The way I see it is I am always moving forward. Whatever they copycat is old news.
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Go tell your affiliate manager? Are you serious?
Grow up, that’s competition.
If you don’t have any other competitve advantages in your processes your dead in the water anyways.
Do you think that Red Bull went crying to the FTC when competitors started copying everything down to their can style?
@Jimmy: I totally get where you are coming from. But, copying a style of can is different from copying Red Bulls Logo, slogan, etc.,. Plus, Red Bull would take the crook to court instead of reporting them to the FTC.
I have no problem with copying a style or using a successful competitors approach as your own, but flat out taking someone else’s design is another issue, imo.
Just out of curiosity, Amit – did you suffer a significant drop in revenue, ROI or traffic when this copycat came along? I recall an acquaintance of mine that was moving their bricks-and-mortar retail business to new larger, posher premises half a block farther down the street. Rather than move the shop, they elected to set up the new shop while keeping the old shop open in the old location. For a month or two they had both stores running — and to their great surprise the business volume in the old shop continued unchanged even though the new “competitor” was open farther down the street. They joked that they could have kept both locations open and made twice as much money!
I had the same thing happen to me. I was able to use the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) by contacting their host to get their site shut down. Followed them to the next host and had it shut down again. Hope this helps. You do have rights but its difficult. Thanks to Rosalind Gardner for the tip on DMCA.