Why your Affiliate Program Needs Protection
If the wrong affiliates get into your affiliate program, you could find yourself faced with the unpleasant consequences of fraud.  Fraudulent affiliates can be costly, and manifest in a number of ways:

• Stolen credit cards can be used to make purchases on your site after clicking through their own affiliate links
• Traffic can be stolen from rightfully-referring affiliates
• Spamming
• Bots can be used to generate fake clicks or leads for your site

You also want for your brand to be represented in the manner in which you have chosen to represent your business. Allowing an affiliate with questionable content on their website, or even one with a poorly designed site, can cause associations with your brand that affect it negatively.

It is in your best interest, then, to do what you can to guard against these events. One of the first steps you can take is at the affiliate approval stage.

The Basics: The Application Process
When starting an affiliate program, the natural inclination is to get as many affiliates on board as quickly as you possibly can. As with any other facet of business, merchants should be mindful of the trade-off between quality and quantity.

As a merchant or affiliate manager, you are ultimately looking to attract super affiliates-i.e. the cream of the crop. Of course, you don’t want to refuse an application from a novice affiliate who is legitimate, as it is today’s novice who may eventually become tomorrow’s super affiliate.

The Affiliate Approval Process: What to Look For
The vast majority of affiliate applications will generally come from people who genuinely want to promote your product or service. However, some may be would-be fraudsters. The sooner you can intercept these individuals, the better – and the earliest possible opportunity is when you first see their applications.

At this juncture, you can use the information that the affiliate has entered when signing up to your affiliate program, including name, address, email address, and payment information.  Affiliates who aren’t well-intentioned tend to follow specific patterns when filling in this information. At Share Results, for example, affiliate applicants are subjected to a 7 step process before being accepted in our network.

Essentially, account details are cross-referenced with payment details and WHOIS (link) records for any incongruities. Then the affiliate’s site is screened for adult content, language, and to ensure that it’s operational. Should any incongruities exist, the affiliate is contacted directly.

Only after all account information is verified as legitimate is an affiliate admitted to the Share Results network. Once an affiliate is approved, retailers then have the additional choice of whether or not to accept an affiliate into their own program.

Each of these items can be reviewed using manual checks, comparing data entered in different parts of the affiliate’s profile, and calling up the WHOIS record for the domain in question.  This process can be time-consuming, however, so to make it easier for affiliate managers and merchants, the Share Results Affiliate Network actually undertakes this task for them.

In our next post in this series, we will take a look at the Affiliate Verification Index used in the Share Results affiliate marketing software solution to calculate a score to help you find the best affiliates for your program.

• Drive online sales at a lower risks/costs than impression-based or cost-per-click advertising: and
• Better target the right users at the right time.

This time around, I’m going to look at some considerations you need to make when choosing an affiliate marketing partner/service-provider.

There are two ways you can approach setting up an affiliate program:

1. You can join an affiliate network, or
2. You can white label affiliate marketing software and set it up yourself.

Each of these approaches have their advantages. Before advertising your products on an existing network, however, you need to weigh your brand and range of product offers against that network and its model.

Size and Scope of an Affiliate Network

The first thing you should consider when looking into partnering with an affiliate network is its size and scope.

While some affiliate networks are very broad and feature every kind of product and company, others are narrower in scope and specialize in specific product verticals.

If you set up your affiliate program through a broader network, you will probably get access to many more affiliates and your campaign can get much wider reach. However, it will be more difficult to find the right affiliates with the targeted traffic to promote your product.

On the other hand, setting up your affiliate program through a network that specializes in a specific vertical will make it much easier to find affiliates experienced in that niche. If you have a diverse range of products to promote, however, a specialized network might limit you from offering other products through that same affiliate program down the road.

Affiliate Account Support

Another thing you need to consider when choosing an affiliate network is the community behind the network. Some affiliate networks are more self-serve oriented, others are more relationship-focused. This impacts both the level of support you get as an advertiser as well as the kind of affiliates you get access to.

Relationship-focused affiliate networks will often focus on affiliate recruitment, campaign promotion, and technical support for advertisers as well as account management for affiliates. Niche content publishers value these relationship-based networks; consequently, the affiliates on these networks tend to be more interested in long-tail and niche promotions as well as developing long-term relationships with the merchants they promote.

On more self-serve style networks, you’re more likely to come across affiliates whose content is broader and more general sites. These broader-appeal affiliates tend to be driven by commission structures rather than merchant relationships. These are often better suited for brands with a very vast array of product offers or regular seasonal promotions.

For instance, a department-store-style merchant might benefit more from a self-serve network. However, a merchant that is advertising focused product offers such as only women’s wear, only sports equipment, or only electronics might benefit from working with a network that focuses on helping affiliates monetizing their niche content.

A final consideration you need to make is technology: what kind of software is powering the network, and how can it help you reach your marketing goals? This last consideration is sufficiently important that we’ll discuss it in its own post next time.