I religiously read Joel Comm’s daily Internet Marketing newsletter to see whose salesman’s smock Joel has wrapped himself in for the day. Today it is ViralURL.com’s ViralBar utility. This affiliate tool allows you to wipe out any would be commission stealers and affiliate ID fraud by cloaking your affiliate link in a most ingenious way. If you are tired of affiliate marketing fraud, this is a great choice to stop it.

I have had commissions stolen before and have used the Dwarf URL converter to shorten links and hide the Aff ID. But this goes a giant step or two further.

First, ViralURL.com’s ViralBar allows you to create a descriptive display URL (such as this one for a home writers course I am promoting: http://viralurl.com/bestdeals/writers). Doing this will allow for better”halo” when a user looks at it on a website or in an email as opposed to a link that looks like this: http://secure1.m57media.com/clients/p2c/u/?caid=XXXX. Using this link exposes my affiliate ID number (here marked by XXXX) and potentially opens me up to some unscrupulous person hiking it and then hacking into my account with the advertiser or network and switching payments to their account information and deleting mine. A not so uncommon situation if you have multiple campaigns going simultaneously and you just let them run without being diligent and checking your numbers daily. I cannot even estimate the amount of money I have lost not protecting my affiliate ID. But No More!

Now that would be cool if that’s all ViralURL.com’s ViralBar did. But there’s more.

Click on this link above and notice at the bottom of the page there is now another offer in addition to the one I am promoting. Now I have twice the ability to sell a prospect. Since I do a fair amount of email marketing, it is always a good choice to have more than less, particularly if you have an untargeted list. When the end user clicks on the offer in the ViralBar, you are transported to another offer. The commissions are all tracked in ViralURL’s subscriber area.

In addition to the additional offer being spun at the top or bottom of the page you send them to, you also get the ability to turn on additional webmasters to this excellent tool. I believe it is up to 5 deep in terms of referrals.

I like this tool, but I think I am going to like it even more after I see it generate cash. Right now I am just happy to have an excellent “halo” type URL to use in my text emails and on my sites and know that my affiliate ID numbers are not like Janet Jackson’s mammary at a Super Bowl – exposed.