How To Make Money With Cookie Stuffing
08. Dec, 2008 
19 Comments
This post is entirely educational and we hold no responsible for any action you take. Cookie stuffing is against the terms of service of most affiliate networks and if you overdo it will get you banned. Neither of us do this any longer, although both have tested it and can confirm that it works. This was a part of an old report I (Casey) created that was sold for $50 or more.
What is cookie stuffing?
Cookie stuffing is basically embedding your cookies into someone else’s computer. That is, your affiliate link.
When someone performs an action based on your affiliate link, it will be the same result as if they had clicked your affiliate link – however, they will not know it. In this way, you can rack up $100s in affiliate commissions.
How do you cookie stuff?
Cookie stuffing is pretty easy.
The first thing you do is edit your .htaccess file under your web hosting. If you do not have a .htaccess file, create one in Notepad and upload it.
The below is what you will need to put in your .htaccess file:
Redirect /img1.jpg http://www.youraffiliatelink1.com
Redirect /img2.jpg http://www.youraffiliatelink2.com
Redirect /img3.jpg http://www.youraffiliatelink3.com
Remember to make sure that those images do not exist.
You can put as many affiliate links as you want, of different kinds of affiliate programs.The ones that work well are eBay (pays up to $35 commission per person), GoDaddy, Hostgator (pays up to $100 per sale!) and other hosting companies. However, you can use any kind of affiliate you like, although higher paying ones are obviously better.
Spend one day going through affiliate organizations like Commission Junction, NeverBlue Ads, Pepperjam etc and looking for affiliate programs that look good.
Once you have a few programs decided, you are good to go. Now let’s talk about three ideas that you can use to send your cookie stuffing profits through the roof.
First off; if you really want to make the most out of cookie stuffing, you will need to buy traffic (if you do not have a website with high traffic already). Why is this? Because if you have 2,000 impressions and 2,000 clicks, of course your affiliate company is going to get suspicious and you will get banned.
If you are going to stay low, you do not need to buy traffic, but why do you want to stay low? You can do this in bulk, just be smart.
Place your uncloaked affiliate link on a normal webpage that you own and pay for traffic to it. Junk traffic will be fine, but send it through somewhere like TinyURL first.
You can find providers of traffic on various webmaster forums like Digital Point or V7N. You can buy 100,000 visitors for just $40 or less. Try and stick with a traffic provider that allows you to set the number of hits you can deliver per day or per hour et cetera. Take a small package to test out your traffic provider, and then order in bulk if it is good.
How to cookie stuff on forums
On forums, all you do is place your images (that are not real) inside IMG tags and you will be cookie stuffing. For example, something like:
[IMG]http://www.yourwebsite.com/img1.jpg[/IMG]
If you are satisifed with the amount of clicks you’ve gotten, delete the code from your .htaccess file. As there is no real image, your code will remain invisible and someone will only sees it if they view source.
There are many cookie stuffing eBooks around, but they all tell you to use forums… in fact, nearly 90% of cookie stuffing eBooks tell you to use Digital Point. It is way too saturated on Digital Point and anyways, you will be getting a lot of useless affiliate cookies embedded from people that are never going to look at your affiliate link… if you want to earn with this, you need to look for targeted users that will make you money.
Let’s talk about how to find those targeted users, and three methods that you can use to make a whole lot of money cookie stuffing.
Targeted users on forums
Stop using places like Digital Point. It’s a waste of time.
As with ‘normal’ affiliate marketing, you want the most targeted users possible to be cookie stuffed so that you will save a lot of time and make a lot of money.
An easy thing to make money off cookie stuffing is with hosting referrals. I made over $2,100 in a month when I was doing this off hosting referrals, and this was all paid out.
All I did was start a few threads on various popular hosting forums, asking a leading question.
What is a leading question? A leading question is a question which you KNOW what more often than not the answer is going to be.
The question I asked (and a few variations of it) was something like:
Is Hostgator Worth the Price?
Now… as Hostgator only costs $0.01 for the first month, I expected answers to be positive… and they were. Of course, I used the above way to stuff my Hostgator cookie in everyone that looked at the thread.
Can you imagine what a newbie looking to buy hosting would think when she or he sees the thread? All they will see is people talking about how cheap it is, and even if there might be problems with Hostgator sometimes, $0.01 was cheap enough for it not to matter.
The good thing is… if you do this on aged forums, there is a good chance that your thread will rank highly for some search engine terms. Meaning long term income. Rinse and repeat for as many different hosting companies as you like.
Is that idea not enough for you? Here’s more.
Join an eBay forum, and start a thread something like “If you HAVEN’T joined eBay, why not?”
This question means that most of the people viewing your thread will (guess what) not have joined eBay yet. And with eBay paying so much commission (up to $35 per user) all you have to do is prod them gently (tell them some of the benefits) and stuff your cookie link. You’ll not just get the signup commission, but also commission on anything they purchase for the first few days.
Another idea… join a blogging forum and ask something like “Do Pay Per Post payout?”. Most people that have used them will say yes, and people seeing the thread that have not joined PPP yet will be happy to join a reputable posting company. Of course, you get $15 per registered user.
Another idea… join a forum where people talk about specific books (for example, a marketing forum would discuss marketing books). Ask a question like “Should I read books by Famous Author?” and stuff your Amazon affiliate link for his best few. People are going to say you should and any marketer looking at the thread may pick one or two up, netting you a few dollars commission.
An example of where I cookie stuffed in the past was for the popular information product called “Make $150/Month On Autopilot” which was about Matched.co.uk (now defunct).
That eBook was sold with master resale rights meaning soon enough there were dozens of people selling, giving it away on forums. Every thread that I came across doing this, I stuffed my affiliate link and ended up with more than fifty referrals, paid out.
Just look for targeted forums and targeted affiliate programs that pay out well and you’ll start making money.
The best forum for cookie stuffing is deal forums. You know, forums where people talk about the best kind of deals.
An example of one HUGE deal forum is:
http://forums.slickdeals.net
As you can see, there are more than 73,000 active users, all looking to save (and thus SPEND) money. Just browse through your CJ account and cookie stuff as many times as you can for as many different (TARGETED) programs as you can.
A way you can find targeted forums is of course our good friend Google… find a good offer, type in “ keyword niche forum” and cookie stuff. How hard is that? 
On to the next method. This method is very blackhat and not for the weak of heart.
Cookie Stuffing Blog Contests
If you read blogs, you’ll know that there are a lot of blog contests going on – sometimes maybe even too many you’d say. However, the more blog contests, the BETTER.
Why? Because blog contests are cookie stuffing paradise.
For example, a large webmaster forum held a blog contest a while ago with loads of prizes. What does loads of prizes mean for us? Loads of targeted interest.
One of the requirements in the contest to get more points was to sign up for Pepperjam – who paid $5/referral. Now, imagine if you had cookie stuffed your affiliate link in that same contest thread; they had at least 100 signups, maybe even more than that. How good a return on time is that for having to make one single post?
At the time I did not get in on the contest, however a marketer I knew stuffed his link on the second page and had more than twenty referrals sign up.
Any contests that require people to signup for an affiliate network is gold because most affiliate networks either offer a) a lifetime percentage of commission or b) a flat fee per signup.
At the moment for example, some affiliate networks offer 5% commission or more lifetime AND sponsor quite a few blog contests. Are your wheels ticking? Leave a comment stuffing your cookie and you can easily get a few signups. Even if you get 100 signups, and only one of them makes $100/day (which is possible) then you are making $150/month doing no work for the rest of your life.
Again, look for targeted contests with high prizes (which means high interest) and requirements that people signup or do an action that will benefit YOU.
Cookie Stuffing eBay
This is just another idea for you guys… cookie stuffing eBay users.
What you do is list something that people will be interested in… really, really cheap. For example, the latest sports car, a house, even technical gadgets like the XBOX, Nintendo Wii, Playstation, iPhone… you get the idea.
Start it at a cheap price, like $0.01 – this guarantees lots of people looking at your auctions. People that are likely to buy on eBay, since your auction is on eBay.
Now… you can try cookie stuffing in the auction listing itself, however I wouldn’t as a) you have no control and b) it is too dangerous as it is easy for eBay to find out.
The way you get around it is saying that something like you could not upload pictures on eBay, so people can check it out at your website (you can use a Blogspot blog). Make sure you cookie stuff them on that Blogspot blog.
The problem is that you may get people interested in your listing.. however the way around this is to use pictures of broken things. Search for “smashed up console” on Google images, take one of those and put it up on your website.
Of course, no one is going to be interested in your auction after that… however you don’t care! Your affiliate cookie is embedded in their computer, and anything they buy over the next few days is your commission.
The higher priced items you do this with, the more money you will make. People looking to buy a house or car will have $xxx,xxx to spend or maybe even more and although they will not buy in your listing, if they DO buy their house or car on eBay you will make hundreds of dollars in affiliate commission.
Note that some are being sued for large scale eBay stuffing. If you keep it to small amounts, you can do this successfully however this is a blackhat method that is short term. There are other blackhat methods which are longer term which I’ll be covering in a few later posts.
Lastly, this post (again) is purely educational. Neither I or Jason cookie stuff anymore however both of us have made money in some ways doing it before. If you want to try this, stay safe, don’t get greedy. We hold no responsibility should you get banned.
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Sounds a little suss and too dodgy for me.
It was a good read though. I hope all your stuff isn’t black hat
Wow, that may be the longest post i will read this week. Good post, I am not a fan of cookie stuffing, but it was an interesting read.
I don’t really care if it’s blackhat, greyhat, or whateverhat. As long as it makes me money… This is a great post, I will definitely try it out on some non-IM forums.
Thanks.
How come your subscribers got so low?
Anyway, I believe you should stick only with white-hat stuff. Think on the long run.
awesome post i know about cookies stuffing for long time but i never did it after reading this post im thinking i should give it try
I am not big into cookie stuffing, i think Google and affiliate networks are wise to this technique and although it may help you make money now is it a long term plan?
Sounds risky to me. Isn’t the owner of DP being sued for cookie stuffing? I wonder how many people have been banned from their favorite forum for doing this!?
This is definitely a good heads up for site owners to monitor the posts on their forums more closely though!
A better explanation on this is at http://wulffy.blogspot.com/2008/11/cookie-dropping-cookie-stuffing.html
Hi.. I have a doubt.. Instead of
Redirect /img1.jpg http://www.youraffiliatelink1.com
can we also use
Redirect /anything.html http://www.youraffiliatelink1.com???
Will this also gives the same result???
Honestly, you are messing up your reputation. I am NEVER going to try such stuff.
Thanks for info about cookie stuffing
I also gave this topic an eye a while back after reading a similar post; Though I myself did never have or will cookie stuff.
During my research I did find though there are loads of ways to do this a lot more effectively and reduce the risk of getting caught.
http://thenexus.tk/want-a-cookie/
Thanks for this informative guide to cookie stuffing.
Is there a way to hide the referer so that affiliate networks cannot see the pages which are being stuffed?
Yes, Flashstuffer.com can blank the referrer and even fake it…
This is pretty neat, but shady at the same time. Is this illegal? If you use this method on a smaller scale, could you still be charged, or will u just be banned?
Thank you for your help!
We do not talk about cookie stuffing
I stumbled upon this and I must say it is an interesting post. I’m confused why so many of the people here are so spooked by this piece of information. I think most people who read this won’t be stuffing cookies, regardless of knowledge gained.
No ones reputation should be at stake for posting such information either, it is only information and no one has to use it (Looking at you: Farrhad).
This is evil.
Awesome.