Affiliates VS Merchants

Do they need to know how we do it?

[ildarius]

A bit of a dilemma here would like your opinion:

I have a friend of mine who is generating a good amount of leads
with a site that's converting a whooping 30-40% of traffic.

He wants to sell the leads to the Merchants, but does not the Merchants to see his page!

His legitimate reason is that if they see the page's lay out and have the URL they can copy his page and find out what keywords he's using and ultimately get rid of him.

How would you do it? What do you think?

[eljefe3]

Guess it depends on the merchants TOS. Why not have your friend contact them and see what they say. BTW, most merchants track where the clicks came from anyway so it's not like your friend is really hiding this info unless he is doing redirects, which may or may not comply with the merchant's TOS.

[jomaxx]

Ultimately this is not the kind of secret that can be kept.

I would think there are some aspects to his successful optimization that are not onpage and are not easily reproducible by random competitors. If not, then his success will be short-lived.