You’ll have seem some internet marketers register domain names specifically to pr’omote a product as an affiliate. They register, for a few bucks, a domain name which looks very much like the target website’s domain name.

If the target website is, for example, www.bigproduct.com, they’ll register the domain name big-product.com

If they’re wanting to send visitors to bigproduct.com via their affiliate link, they simply set up a single page on their website under their new domain name, big-product.com and redirect visitors to the target site. It’s a very simple piece of HTML coding, and often, people don’t notice, when they go to the affiliate’s new website, that it’s not the name of the target site.

A few days ago I saw a very neat twist to this method. Again, assume that the target site is www.bigproduct.com, the guy bought the domain name www-bigproduct.com.

Since it’s possible to set up a website so that it works without the “www” bit, this guy simple sent his visitors to

http://www-bigproduct.com

.. and they’d go to the target site:

http://www.bigproduct.com

.. through the guy’s affiliate link!

Not many people would notice that it was a dash rather than a period between the “www” and the rest of the domain name. They’d be even less inclined to think that it was an affiliate link.

Sneaky, eh! But perfectly legitimate.