Warning: Please consider the repercussions of using this sort of thing, it is considered bad practice and unbecoming of a respectable affiliate marketer.
You may be familiar with cookie stuffing already, but this cookie stuffing technique is far more effective than tagging a bunch of your own websites with your cookie, or even (shudder) infecting others’ web space with your links. Using images to stuff cookies (and rake in the commissions) is being used across the web by the black hat professionals, but there are many layers of complexity to remaining “safe” when you are employing these types of practices, so remember, this is a proof of concept! You could be banned from the sites cookie stuffed images are posted on, as well as the affiliate programs these images were crafted to con.
Well, on to it then, shall we?
It’s really quite simple, all that is required is a web server with php installed and mod_rewrite enabled so you can use a .htaccess file to cloak your image, which is really a script that redirects them to your affiliate link.
Create an .htaccess file with these contents:
<Files imagename.jpg>
ForceType application/x-httpd-php
</Files>
You can change imagename.jpg to whatever you want to call your image, it doesn’t really matter. After you’ve created this file, create a text file with the following contents, and then save it as the file name you chose in the .htaccess file.
<?
if(!$_SERVER[‘HTTP_REFERER’]){
header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");
} else {
header("Location: http://www.yourpartner.com/a31dks3Zqc3x");
}
?>
When the “image” is loaded from a website, the headers and cookies from the affiliate link will be processed by the user who is currently browsing that website. If for some reason somebody investigates and directly visits the image, it will display a 404 error instead of redirecting them to your affiliate link, which adds some sort of security to this mechanism.
