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Affiliate Marketers, are You Getting Ripped Off?
by
Willie Crawford
Published on this site: March 25th, 2006 - See
more articles from this month
Affiliate marketing has been very good to me, and I think it's a brilliant
concept. The merchant doesn't have to pay a penny until his affiliate makes a
sale, and the affiliate doesn't have to invest heavily in creating his own products.
However, many affiliates are getting ripped off, big time, and don't even realize
it.
Some shams are glaringly obvious. One being a beg link right in the
middle of a sales page inviting potential customers to join the affiliate program.
The affiliate spends lots of time and money driving potential customers to a site.
Then, the merchant interrupts the sales process and invites the customer to not
make a purchase... but instead to sign up as an affiliate. Many prospects do signup,
then buy through their own affiliate links for an instant discount!
Clearly,
a better system than the one just described is to invite the customer to become
an affiliate after he makes a purchase. This could be done on the thank you page,
or in a follow-up autoresponder.
Some affiliate rip-offs are due to shoddy
tracking systems. I've lost literally tens of thousands of dollars in commissions
when the affiliate tracking systems "dropped cookies" or failed to track
orders properly. Most affiliates who fall victim to this are never even aware
of it happening.
Then there are the merchants who have ridiculous timeframes
that they'll pay for a referral. They know that with bigger ticket items, they
often need to follow up for perhaps months, so they only give credit for the order
if the customer buys
during some shorter time period after that first visit.
There
is also a lot of technology being brought into play that allows affiliates to
steal from each other. I've fallen victim to that too. I was once shocked to see
an iframe pulling another affiliates link into a section of one of my webpages.
Exactly how that got there I'll never know, but I was driving traffic to my webpage
and making sales for someone else.
There are literally dozens of ways that
affiliates can steal your customers right off your site, or at least prevent you
from getting credited with sales resulting from
your hard work. It's probably
too dangerous, to cover those methods here. One of the most eye-opening books
I've read on dirty tricks that are played in the affiliate marketing games is
called, "AdWords Black Book." It reveals stealthy ways of generating
an unfair advantage using Google AdWords (TM), but it also shows what goes on
in the bigger world... beyond AdWords.
Adwords Black Book was only released
in limited quantity (only a total of 500 copies) but if it's still available it's
at: https://paydotcom.com/r/5547/williec/201591/
If it's already off the market, you'll undoubted see discussion on online forums
about some of these dirty tricks.
As an affiliate marketer, you just need
to be aware that you may be working very diligently to generate sales, and then
have them stolen right out from under your nose. This can be done through software
that you download and install on your computer. This can be done through code
embedded in webpages that you visit. This can be done through browser settings
or coding.
When you really look at all of the ways that your affiliate
commissions can be stolen from you, it may shock you that you make any commissions
on certain
products. In-fact, it may explain why you don't make commissions
on certain products.
So what does this mean to you? It means that, as an
affiliate, you need to be very diligent. You need to research and understand the
ways that you can be
ripped off. By understanding what's going on out there,
you are better prepared to take preventative measures. This is the best way to
ensure that you are properly
rewarded for your hard work. Without educating
yourself, you're just taking a real gamble when you spend money advertising affiliate
products.
Willie
Crawford serves as a consultant, mentor, and confidant to some of Internet
marketing's top income earners. You can tap into his 9 years of online experience
and million-dollar, success-creating advice at
http://BlueprintToInternetMarketingSuccess.com
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