Who wants a Cookie?

We breifly mentioned cookies on the last page and a little about why they are important. Here we are going to discuss why they are critical to the success of your referral marketing.

While many people understand cookies, it is worth having a brief overview to make sure we understand how they help or hurt us. A cookie is a small piece of information stored on your computer that is used by a website to hold data (your referral id in the case of stock photography agencies). The longer the cookie remains active the more time that a buyer or photographer has to take your advice and signup with the agency. A cookie of longer than 2-3 months won't make much difference as a different cookie has probably replaced it, or the user may have cleared their cookies by this point.

Testing Links - How do I know its working?

Testing links periodically is very critical. We once went for 2 months with a broken referral link, losing who knows how much money. Firefox is a great tool to test referral links and we are going to discuss just how to do it.

Got Firefox?

Once you have installed Firefox, youi need to track down the plugin called LiveHeaders. LivedHeaders allows you to see what is going on behind the scenes when you load a web page.

Sniffing out the code

Once you have everythign installed testing your referral code is not very complicated, though you have to look trhgouh a lot of stuff that is note english.

Here are the basic steps to making sure your referral code is working.

• Open Firefox and go to your website or blog where the referral link is active.
• Open Live Headers in the tools menu and move the window to the side
• Click the banner or other link and wait for the agency webpage to load
• You will now have a ton of information in the Live Headers window, most of it useless. The thing that you are looking for is a line that starts with ,"Set-Cookie" and has your referral code in it.