How to Not Get Burned In Affiliate Marketing By a Merchant

Affiliate marketing is one way that people make quite a bit of money working from home on the computer. Basically affiliate marketing involves selling a product for a merchant and getting a percentage of the revenue from the sale that you made. As most people know not everyone is an honest business person. It's a sad fact but there are tons of people doing business on the Internet that are scamming others and that are greedy and selfish. When dealing with affiliate marketing, you may run into several of those people. Here are some tips on you can prevent or stop yourself from getting burned by a merchant when you are an affiliate marketer.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

1. Follow any links that you are provided with from the merchant for affiliate marketing. If you just place the links on your website and never bother to click on them every once in awhile, you could potentially be losing a lot of money. Check to see if your merchant has snuck in a link that will not give you any cash but will definitely give your merchant money when a visitor clicks from your website. If you never click on your links, you will never find out what is going on and this can potentially make you lose money if you are working with a sneaky merchant.

2. Check out your merchant's website to see if they are promoting any products that compete with any of your other affiliate programs. If your merchant is promoting the same product as you and you are sending people to their website, you are going to lose out on the money that you could have potentially made from the sale. Instead you are driving traffic to your merchant is may be your competitor with other affiliate programs.

3. Check your merchant's website to see if they have a toll free number for buying the product. If they do, it is not a good idea to work with them. You send traffic to their website so that people can buy the affiliate product, but the person decides to call the toll free number to order instead. You lose out on any of the money from the sale since they did not order it online using your affiliate link.

4. Be wary of any affiliate marketing program that will not pay you until a specific amount of products have been sold. Never ever sign up for an affiliate program were the merchant only pays you after 10 products have been sold. What if only 9 products sell? You never see any of that money from those 9 sales. Instead make sure that you receive money from the sale as soon as the sale happens.

5. Select your affiliate marketing programs with care. Don't just choose a merchant at random. Be sure to do your research and keep up-to-date on the product information and you can help prevent being burned in affiliate marketing.

Tips & Warnings

• Making sure that you are keeping up to date on your affiliate marketing and all your merchants can help prevent you from losing money on your programs.

[CaseyCarlton]

on 3/29/2009 Excellent article with many good points. 5 stars and a recommend