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4 Tips to Avoiding Affiliate Fraud

Written by: Jeff Casmer

Article Overview: As long as there are internet businesses, there will be people trying to steal your income. Affiliate theft and fraud are on the rise. More than ever merchants need to monitor the actions of their affiliates and arm themselves against fraud. Especially if you consider that the FTC is now making merchants responsible for the action of their affiliates. While good affiliates can make you money, naughty ones can cost you a lot.

4 Tips to Avoiding Affiliate Fraud

As long as there are internet businesses, there will be people trying to steal your income. Affiliate theft and fraud are on the rise. More than ever merchants need to monitor the actions of their affiliates and arm themselves against fraud. Especially if you consider that the FTC is now making merchants responsible for the action of their affiliates. While good affiliates can make you money, naughty ones can cost you a lot.

The first action to take is to find out what type of frauds your affiliates may be capable of. Below are a few examples.

Typosquatting: Also know as URL hijacking. Typosquatters register several variations of a high traffic domain names and then sign up for that same merchant's affiliate program to sell them what should have been their own traffic.

Spammers: Affiliates who send unsolicited e-mails featuring a net marketer's product, this can essentially tarnish the product. Spammers also make it difficult for the legitimate e-mailers to separate themselves. In many cases complaints have gotten the merchant's domain on blacklists

Fraudulent and Fake Transactions: This can be in the form of the fraudster creating scripts to generate phony clicks, leads, or transactions. Or they may sign up as affiliates and then make large purchases using a stolen credit card.

Malware: Some affiliates use adware that is inadvertently installed on a person's computer is designed to steal traffic from legitimate affiliates by replacing their links with new ones. Thus legitimate affiliates don't get paid and eventually move on.

Once you are aware of the types of frauds out there, you will want to screen all your affiliate. Yes, you may have hundreds or even thousands of people signing up for your affiliate program, but among these may be unserious hobbyists, spammers and sophisticated con artists. It is important to weed people out in order to be left with serious marketers. You can not afford to be lazy.

Below are some screening tips.

1. All affiliates must have an active website. A lack of one may mean they're spammers

2. The affiliate site content must relate to your products and services. Having back links that do not relate to your site can harm your search engine ranking.

3. The site should be optimized with content.

4. Make sure your affiliates understand the policies surrounding the use of content from your site.

Most importantly you must communicate with your affiliates. A new product is not needed as an excuse to contact them; often a quick note to see how they're doing, if they need anything, and to check up on them works fine.

The important thing is that you know what they are doing, how they are performing and what means they are using to make sales. You may feel as if you are annoying them but this is your business, the more control and organization you have the better you'll do.

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  Best Affiliate Programs - 7 Ways to Find Them!
  How to Make Money Selling Other People’s Stuff

Article Tags: fraud, ftc, internet businesses, merchants, money, naughty ones



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Business Tips - How about: Tips for managers to handle employees more effectively? Tips on how to deal with difficult customers? Tips on how to deal more effectively with suppliers? The only three I have in mind right now, but will try to come up with something else. Chris
Re: How To Replace Google Adsense? - Click Fraud is usually when you click on your own ads or Use Fake PPC to get paid.. As far as Replaceing Adsense you can try bidvertiser.com or you can start a similar site and use an IP Faker so they don't know it's you and create a new account. I don't use adsense myself, but I heard this on another forum. Hope this helps!
Re: Affiliate Marketing - Open for Discussion - Carol, Mary and David - thanks for your great input and insight on Affiliate Marketing! This is the kind of discussion I was hoping for in this thread. There are pros and cons to Affiliate Marketing, just as there are to any business. As has been suggested, he best policy is to proceed with caution and do some research before jumping in. As Carol has recommended, this topic thread in the EvanCarmichael.com forum is the ideal place to ask questions and seek further input on available Affiliate Marketing programs. If a person is serious about building an online business and is interested in Affiliate Marketing plans, they should approach the process as they would any other form of business. Research, ask questions, compare opportunities, participate in forums on online business and Affiliate Marketing. GT :-]
Re: Affiliate Marketing - Open for Discussion - You made some very good points here Jeff and I agree with you, Affiliate Marketing should not be something that you concentrate all your efforts into. As i said earlier I have learned a lot with Affiliate Marketing and continue to do so, and it has helped me tremendously to understand what I am going to have to do in my chosen niche(s). I am also being coached by the same group of mentors as GT and we are all moving forward daily to achieve our ultimate goals. Take care, Carol
Re: Affiliate Marketing - Open for Discussion - Hi GT Affiliate Marketing is one of the easier ways to get started making money online, but it does take quite a bit of work before you see any great results as you have to keep promoting constantly. It does teach you one hell of a lot about all aspects of Internet Marketing though as you will need to learn how to write and submit articles, create and maintain a blog, social networking is a great help to affiliates too..the list goes on and on. In fact from what you learn from Affiliate Marketing you can apply to any niche and be sure to succeed, take care, Carol


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