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Protect Your Affiliate Program from Affiliate-Scammers

Learn how to protect yourself from affiliates-scammers

Regimantas Andre

May 22, 2008

In an affiliate program, one or more less popular companies join together and help one another in marketing their products and services. The program works as the affiliates are paid commission whenever something is brought to the parent site through the attempts of the affiliates including website visitors, purchases made at the affiliate site, clicks on the advertisements or new registrations at the site. Recruiting affiliates helps in spreading the brand awareness of the company, attract more traffic to the site and increase the sales of the company, therefore it becomes extremely essential to choose an affiliate who is well-versed with the technicalities of marketing and who is able to attract more traffic to your website. It is a wonderful idea to have some one to work for you and send traffic to your website and all you have to do is to sit and wait for the visitors logging on to your site.

In order to attract affiliates to your website, you need to place ads on the relevant websites that are attractive enough to draw people who are interested to become affiliates. But… Among a lot of good affiliates, there are a huge number of affiliate scammers on the net who are lying around and waiting to trap you when you start looking for a real affiliate to do deal with. Believe it or not, there is an entire niche industry of these scammers. So, in order to avoid being trapped by these affiliate scammers, you need to follow these simple steps while recruiting an affiliate:

1. First of all, you must make sure that the affiliates recruited by you have your web links on their website. May be you will have to remind them a few times through monthly newsletters and monthly progress reports.

2. Always track your affiliates – where do they get the traffic from – websites, search engines, pay per click campaigns, etc. Check if the affiliates are placing your ads on some of the most popular sites.

3. Check if they are submitting articles or any content about your products to some of the most reputed article directories.

4. In order to get away from the affiliate scammers, do a lot of research of the affiliates when they join your affiliate program. Track where do they get their traffic from, track if that traffic converts. You should definitely check for fraud that affiliates might bring. E.g. if an affiliate joins and starts making a lot of sales in a very short period of time, you should better check where does he/she gets the traffic from, if it’s a legit traffic, etc.

5. Join some good web-master forums and read their posts and threads. Try to search for posts about affiliate’s scamming. This way you will definitely find some user experiences and tips on how to avoid such affiliates.

6. Once an affiliate signs up on your program and starts making sales, you should definitely contact him/her. Why? This way you could develop a relationship with your partner, ask if he/she needs anything more to promote. This way you could also check out if your affiliate responds to your messages.

7. You need to have a good affiliate management system like Click2Sell.EU (http://www.click2sell.eu) in order to completely track all your own and your affiliates sales, track your affiliate’s performance and if you find the bad ones – you can easily ban them. This way you can keep a record of your sales drawn through the affiliate’s efforts and develop a good partnership with your affiliates.

If you have started your own affiliate program and want to recruit some affiliates for your program then the above mentioned tips can provide you with the best possible affiliates in the market and also avoid you from getting involved in undesirable affiliate scammers.

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