With cookie stuffing or cookie dropping however, you can make commissions from people who DID NOT click on your affiliate link at all. In other words, you’re making money not by referring people to the merchant’s website as you should be doing, but by secretly loading the website (and dropping the affiliate cookie) in the background without the visitor’s knowledge.
Here are some common cookie stuffing methods:
- Image or iFrame cookie drops – With this method, you insert a 1×1 pixel image or iframe on your website that loads your affiliate link. For the visitor, your tiny image or iframe is invisible, but nevertheless he gets your affiliate cookie on his computer and you’ll make money off his purchase for all the cookies you drop.
- WordPress plugins - There are some WordPress plugins (I won’t mention them here) that basically do the method above, but in an automated way across all your posts, or only selected ones.
- Pop-ups or pop-unders - These are very easily blocked by your browsers today, but in the glory days of popups, tons of people used them to stuff cookies.
- Browser toolbars or malware – Shawn Hogan, in the eBay case, used browser toolbars that he created to implement cookie stuffing. Some computer software you’ve downloaded for free may also be stuffing cookies on your PC every time you use it.
- Adobe Flash and Flash components - Everyone knows Flash is not secure. You can load an affiliate link in Flash, both you your site and on third-party sites.
