This little htaccess recipe allows you to secretly plant Clickbank cookies (aka "cookie stuffing") on the unsuspecting visitors of forums which you visit.

In other words, you'll be able to set Clickbank cookies even when people don't click your clickbank hoplink. People will only have to read a thread which you've posted to in order for you to have your cookie set on their computer.

• What's it do
• Background
• The Secret
• Get the Code
• How to stuff cookies using this method
• Summary

In November, I made this post at the Clickbank Success Forum about the nice and shady concept of cookie stuffing. Read that for a pretty basic lowdown on the arguably unethical practice of cookie stuffing.

I've used several cookie stuffing methods, but it wasn't until I read this post over at eWealth in which some ingenious marketer was exposed for using a very clever method of loading clickbank hoplinks in image tags hidden in his forum posts.

That may not seem like any big deal because in HTML it's easy to put any URI in an image tag as web browsers don't really care - they'll load it anyway.

Now, most forums I go to have mechanisms in place that prevent you from entering URI's in image tags. Therefore, you can't enter a url like http://yourid.vendor.hop.clickbank.net/ as an image url in most forums I've seen.

A workaround is needed so that we can cookie stuff using image tags in forums.

 

What we need to do is to fool the forum software into thinking that we are only loading images into people's browsers.

The way that forum software is able to tell if images are inserted is kind of crude. All that matters is that the URI looks like an image url.

For instance, the scripting functions would reject a url as an image if it looked like this:

http://youraffid.vendorid.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=forum

BUT, if your URI's look like image URI's, like the following, they'll pass:

http://yourdomain.com/pics/vendorid/forum.jpg

They'll pass the verification for image URI's because they LOOK like image URI's.

 

This method of cookie stuffing is simple to use.

1. create a directory on your web space and call it "pics"
2. make a file called .htaccess in the directory you made in step one
3. place the following two lines of code in your .htaccess file (replace "yourcbid" with your actual Clickbank ID)

Here's all you have to do. It's really simple if you're a little bit intelligent.

• We'll assume that your .htaccess file resides in the directory example.com/pics/
  
  
• On forums that use bbcode, just insert an image in your post using the following form:

(The example above shows the bbcode image tags.)

Just make sure you replace "vendorid" with the Clickbank Vendor ID of the product you wish to promote.

Also, replace "tid" with your desired tracking ID.

 

Summary

The above cookie stuffing method bypasses most forum software image verification using only 2 lines in an htaccess file.

I'm not sure I'd want to stuff cookies in an affiliate marketing forum like the guy at ewealth did, but if you use it, be sure to be prepared for any backlash from forum owners, Clickbank, etc.

Oh, you might get banned from forums using this technique. You may even get banned from Clickbank. Of course, if you had any question of that, you probably don't know what this is all about.