Oh No! He Stole My Site!

One of the ways you know that you’re doing something right in affiliate marketing is when somebody rips your landing page and starts promoting right under you. While this may be flattering for a whole 3 seconds, rage will set in soon thereafter. What can you do about these pricks that steal everything you’ve worked so hard to get going? I’m sure if you’ve had this happen to you, you’ve wondered that.

I’m afraid to say the answer is nothing. Most internet marketers lack the ability to think for themselves, so instead of trying their own method of promotion, they’ll find the person at the top and rip everything they have. It’s actually not a bad strategy when we look at it, they’re obviously profiting at what they do, so I’ll just copy everything and have the same success. While many times this does work, these copycats realize sometimes it’s not all just copying.

I’ve had everything in one campaign or another be ripped. I’ve had my landing page ripped about 1,000 times (a lot of them exactly just pulling my source code and uploading it onto their servers), exact ad copy, offer, affiliate network, keywords…anything you can think of. I’ve even had sites where 50 content articles have been copied completely. Although there’s no real way to stop these affiliates, there are a couple things you can try,

1) Talk to the affiliate network their promoting on. Grab the affiliate code and say “Hey, affiliate 12345 completely ripped my website, have it taken down immediately.” If you aren’t a part of the network, it usually takes a while for a manager to actually say something to that affiliate. If you’re promoting the offer on that network, they’ll 95% of the time get it taken care of quicker. This works about 20% of the time. Most people just have a designer make their own copy of the page, which looks almost exact to yours, just a few differences so you can’t attack them or anything.

2) If they’re actually stealing all your content, write them a letter saying to take your content down you have it copyright protected and you’ll take legal action. This also sometimes works.

3) If they copy your domain almost exactly, and it’s a really big campaign, get a trademark on your domain and then go after them for using your TM.

4) Reading the second comment made me think of something else that I have in fact done. You can call up the hosting company of the copycat site, and let them know that one of their users is stealing your website and/or trademark, and they have X amount of hours to take the site down before legal action is taken against the hosting company. I have actually had this work for me in the past.

I’m afraid most of the time in the end, we’re all just going to have to suck it up and accept that it’s a part of our market.

Another thing copycats don’t realize is that even when they think everything is possible has been copied, many times they’ll still lose money on a campaign. I’d rather let them learn the hard way on that one, so most copycats I don’t bother with. If you’re really solid in a niche you shouldn’t be too worried. They won’t be able to initially compete with your quality score so if they bid above you, they’re going to lose cash. If you’ve been running the offer chances are you have a special high payout, which allows more flexibility in bidding and keyword range…something copycats won’t have either. So all in all, most of the copycats are suicide bombers that pop on top of me for a few days and then are gone because they simply can’t last.

Just one of the things we all have to realize I guess, there’s no magical way to stop anybody from copying your page or adcopy. Just look past it and keep doin’ what you’re doin’. Hey, without competition we’d all sit in position #1 for 0.01 a click and have an ROI of 3000%…now what fun is there in that???