By Shawn Collins
iMediaConnection
There is an immoral minority in affiliate marketing who wreck havoc and cause headaches to affiliate managers. They stuff cookies, spam blogs, redirect affiliate links, and commit a whole assortment of dirty deeds.
We could go the Travis Bickle route and hope that someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets. But a more reasoned, and effective approach is to take some proactive measures, monitor affiliate activity closely and enforce your terms and conditions.
Terms of Endearment
There are certain truisms in affiliate marketing, like affiliate agreements for most programs are outdated boilerplates. And affiliates don’t read affiliate agreements.
It has long been common that new affiliate programs, especially those without in-house legal counsel, borrow extensively from affiliate agreements used by other companies. In the late ‘90s and early part of this century, it was laughable how many affiliate programs did a find and replace on the Amazon affiliate agreement, and then called it their own. There were hundreds of agreements out there with the same typos as Amazon.
There are a few problems with this approach. The assumption that one size fits all is flawed. If your target market is middle aged men in the Pacific Northwest, the particulars for your program will be a lot different than those of a bookseller.
Also, there’s always a new bogeyman in the industry that needs to be addressed, and you cannot count on other companies to do your homework. Finally, it’s not cool to steal from others.
Complete article at http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/4604.asp