Affiliate cookie stuffing is one of the hottest issues in the affiliate marketing industry. Many unethical affiliates use pay per click marketing to drive you to their landing pages that are just designed to drop cookies of several merchants on your site. Let's say you land on a website that is offering you to buy an HDTV but you decide to try other sites that offer more information about your favorite HDTVs. Cookie stuffers hedge their risks by putting cookies from Amazon and other top merchants on your computers in order get affiliate commission even when your leave their site.

Affiliate marketers get paid when visitors click on their links and complete an action. Once the visitors click on the links, the merchants put a cookie on the their computers to track the sales for the affiliates. But cookie stuffers approach all this differently. What these folks do is basically using IFRAMES or Javascript to load cookies on your readers' computers and emulate the action of clicking on affiliate links. There are several ways to take stuff cookie and hide your tracks, but in general you should avoid this approach as you can get kicked out of affiliate programs and get sued by merchants if you get caught.

Affiliate networks often accept the concept of embedded links. Let's say you write a piece about a product on X.com, and you put your heart and soul in reviewing that item. However, X.com may not offer you the direct affiliate link for that product. There is a good chance that your readers can pick up the product without you getting the commission. Affiliate Cloner and similar solutions allow you to embed links on your sales pages in order for you to get the credit you deserve after putting your time and effort to write a review for that specific product.

You can use Affiliate Cloner the right way or the wrong way. There are many coupon sites that just load specific cookies on each page for the merchants they have agreements with but forget to actually promote the merchants' products. Using Affiliate Cloner to put a merchant's cookie on your visitors' machines without actually promoting the merchant is unethical. But cloaking your links and making sure that you get credit for your hard work is more than fair to me. You may want to check with affiliate networks to see if they allow embedded links (I know CJ doesn't), but fair merchants are fine with you promoting a product and getting credit for your work. In fact, many merchants are going out of their way to allow affiliates to direct visitors to any pages on their sites to get credit, and that would simply make embedding links unnecessary for most affiliates. But if you find merchants, who are not fine with your approach, maybe you shouldn't promote their products.

Black Hat and White Hat affiliate marketers approach this business in a total different way. Black Hat marketers are out to make quick cash with short-term approach, whereas white hat marketers (who incidentally do not approve affiliate cookie stuffing) are out to build relationships and long-term businesses. Which side you are going to end up is going to be determined by your values, your integrity, and your approach to building a business.