Affiliate Marketing Blog

This post is simply to tell everyone about excellence in the Affiliate Area when I see it, I know many of my posts are not what you would call “very positive” and “up beat” as I am trying to right some wrongs but I also need to spend time telling people what works, what is good and what we can learn from and the dudes at Sunshine are people we could learn from.

I was reading one of their blogs today, Mission #6 and as I had not actually checked out Mission #1 to #5 I thought I had best get over and take a look. If you don’t know, basically they are setting different Missions that Affiliates can take part in and you have a chance to win prizes, and they made it open to everyone, heck you don’t even need to have done a single thing in travel and you can still find a mission to take part in, indeed Mission #6 is to get you started, to make your first travel site. It’s a very well thought out campaign and indeed the fact it’s not been just a one off has paid off, because here I am at Mission #6 writing about it, if they had not had this many so far I may never have checked it out.

However all that a side what I want to point out is something I never seen on an Affiliate Resource page on a Merchants site before, a live chat that is actually got the owners of the company standing by, now I doubt that can last for ever as these guys grow but just to test it wasn’t some on page eye candy but in fact really manned by the named people I clicked the link, waited less than 20 seconds and was in direct contact with one of the site owners to ask my questions, how good is that! Truly excellent from an Affiliates point of view, instant questions and answers, granted they are still at the starting stages so it may not last forever however it certainly would encourage me to get involved with these guys at the early stages as they are clearly chucking everything at this project to make it a success from an Affiliate Marketing point of view, so well done guys!

To-do: 1 upbeat positive post a year. I can now tick this off my list LOL

Note: Actually that was a lot less painful to do than I was expecting (hate American style cringe worthy your great posts), so I think I will do more in future on any Merchants, Agency, Affiliate (if they are ok with me pointing it out) or Network that is doing something note worthy from now on will find they get an article written about them, but please don’t ask me to do one, I need to find out and think it’s well done on my own time via the methods of being an Affiliate I use and they will be a limited number of posts, every so often, as I am no kiss ase love everyone type LOL

However what worries me is, are these sites and systems so fundamentally flawed that they can’t move from the beta stage or is their some hidden meaning, for example is this a protection method so if their systems do mess up then they are legally protected i.e. say they don’t pay you out the commission your expecting is it just simply a case of saying, “but we told you this is a beta program, your using it at your own risk”.

Recently I was quite pleased to see Affiliate Future buck this trend of “beta” releases, by doing something that Paid On Results done also. Have beta testers test behind the scene before releasing the new version but still offer access to the old one when it’s live. The new version is fully working and not a beta version, sure a few bugs might appear as is expected with every system however they clearly believe in their product not to tag it as beta but respect the fact with such a huge upgrade some people will like to use the old version for a time until they get used to the new features. I like the new version and not just the looks it’s actually better by a mile than the last.

So come on guys, won’t point any fingers but get your stuff out of beta, show you actually believe in your product and are giving it your full backing. Beta doesn’t mean you can “delay offering full support and/or responsibility for remaining issues” get them sorted and give us “your customers/suppliers” the reassurance that we are not using some half-baked system that could collapse at any time.

Scenario 1 - The most obvious and straight forward case is of an Affiliate that joins a Network and delivers leads using multiple free email accounts or makes sales using fake credit card details in the hope they not only do they get the goods from a Merchant (some don’t even care where the goods go) but also get paid commission for defrauding them at the same time. It’s rare but it happens!

What to look for: Same IP, or similar IP’s used over and over, easy to spot with loads of data, hard when it is a one off. Use-once email addresses are often used in this type of fraud, the likes of hotmail and yahoo etc are not used that much these days because the process for sign-up is a long one where as recursor.net, xoxy.net & mailinator.com offer pretty much unlimited number of addresses that require very little setup. It is not these companies faults that people use them to commit fraud but sadly that’s what some people are doing. Fraudulent sales from outside the country, check the IP Flag for the lead/sale. While it’s normal for people on holiday to buy things for friends back home over the Internet, these are the type of sales that Merchants should look at more closely.

Scenario 2 - Affiliate delivers the majority of his/her sales without any issues however a few big orders come through that are fraudulent or most of the leads they are sending are genuine but they sign up themselves via there Affiliate account and you don’t like this.

What to look for: Well you won’t find any real pattern other than majority of the stuff they do is legit and it’s these one off incidents that come up from time to time, as long as they are few and far between and it pretty much sits along same levels of fraud you experience outside of the Affiliate Marketing channel then you have nothing to worry about. As for an Affiliate joining your leads based program, it’s probably a test and is pretty much standard practice by many Affiliates before they deliver you hundreds or thousands of leads simply because we have all been down the road of big promotions only to see no conversions. However if this is a huge problem for you then I recommend you let the Affiliate know you will be removing it after the test, they won’t care however is it worth your time to even bother, your choice. If they test every other day and have not let you know, it could be possible fraud however approach the Affiliate before booting them.

Scenario 3 - Affiliate is incentive based or cash-back site, they get a few members who like scenario 1 sign-up to loads of stuff, however what makes it harder to spot is that the majority of the traffic is good and just a few bad eggs that are taking advantage and in some cases for thousands of pounds. However who is responsible here, well from Merchants and Networks point of view, it’s your Affiliate account and any criminal act that happens via it is your responsibility.

What to look for: Pretty much the same as scenario 1, only as an incentive based site when you collate your sales/leads you should be able to easily spot members who have signed up to a leads based program more than once, could set a checking threshold at if more than 3 sign-ups flag for investigation.

What can Affiliates like this do: Well for a start off flag up all leads based stuff to allow members only 1 entry and then block them from receiving any more commission. Add image based sign-up process for accounts on your site (Merchants could do this their end to really set back any automated fraud operation). Monitor members with more than 1 account, this is very easy to spot, but keep in mind family members may have an account each and use same computer and IP.

In Summary: Merchants check your leads and sales more closely, just because they are from the same IP doesn’t mean they are fraud and equally just because they are from overseas doesn’t mean anything without investigation. If you spot a fraudulent Affiliate contact your Network and have them binned (remember a Network should confirm everything before they bin an Affiliate on your say so), if you’re not sure for example like in the cash-back (Scenario 3) ask the Network to investigate further, it could just be the cash-back site has no real security in place and needs advice to tighten it up, if they don’t you can always drop them from your program.

For Affiliates it’s key that you combat any user fraud within your control as leaving it to run on and on could leave you liable for legal challenges or indeed Police investigation of your activates if wide spread and a lot of money is involved but more important than this it could damage trust in your sector and may find Affiliates of similar type of sites being refused access to program or commission lowered due to preserved risk.

Note: I have not put up every type of scenario as I don’t want to give people ideas, especially the harder to spot ones I have come across over the years. I have missed out Spyware totally as anyone using that knows what they are doing and once caught should be instantly binned and all commission returned.

I have been noticing for some time now the worrying trend of fraudster users on cash-back sites using the cash-back site as a mean to defraud merchants, normally they target leads based sites as that’s an easy way to get money if the networks/merchants are not monitoring for such fraud.

The reason these people have for the most part stopped going and doing this fraud direct via networks is simply because they standout like a sore thumb as the majority of their transactions are easily spotted, however go and do the same thing via a cash-back site and all of a sudden you’re near 100% fraud rate becomes a much smaller and harder to spot percentage that some merchants could easily ignore because the majority of the cash backs traffic is good.

The problem is that cash-back sites are just not geared up to look out for this type of fraud, indeed many freely admit they don’t have the time or indeed any clue as to what to look out for.

So I am going to help you a little here, don’t want to give to much off the game away publicly as no doubt some crafty fraudster is reading this blog post right now. So here is the simplest way to work out if a user is trying to defraud a merchant and a network and possibly getting you in to soapy bubble with the law for aiding and abetting this crime or at the very least having your site kicked from the program so your legitimate users don’t get access to it.

Simply set a flag in your database for leads based programs where you can only sign up the once to get cash-back, if a user signs-up more than 3 times you have a possible problem on your hands, if sign up 10+ times you have a fraudster.

With 100% cash-back in full swing I am waiting to see what effect this has on credit card transactions with foreign users of these cash-back sites being able to be paid via Paypal with minimal or no checks carried out on the transactions they are putting through one at a time across a vast array of networks and merchants.

Time will tell but if cash-back sites don’t take notice of this warning post, but you may find that to compensate merchants will offer cash-back lower commission rates or indeed refuse to work with you if the level of abuse is to high.

He interviews some affiliates (good eggs) that use codes to help hook-in customers to buying from a merchant, indeed I myself have been doing that very same thing since 1997 on my website Free UK Stuff. Discount codes, money off, vouchers and coupons have always played a big part in that site and as early as 1999 I decided to make spin off sites from Free UK Stuff. I had loads of choices and at the time was doing rather well from Competitions so I launched UK Competitions and I was doing ok from Coupons / Vouchers but also special offers and deals that didn’t fit the scope of just a “codes” site so I went with launching an Offers based site a few years later called Free UK Offers.

The question I am asking myself was, back in 1999 when I was picking UKCompetitions.com or UKCoupons.com what should I have done? Well I think I done the right thing for the time however as Jason from Loquax can tell you Competitions are a pain in the backside to keep up dated and I have a fraction of competitions that he has on his. I even made a half hearted attempt to lunch the coupons site in 2004 and again in 2006 but as I was very busy with other companies/projects and the stuff we where doing at the time was needing more and more work so it just never happened.

Now I am asking myself, should I even get involved in the whole coupons / voucher thing? I am certainly always looking for ways to capitalise on my bank of very good domain names, great website ideas or ways to do something better that is already being done but are coupon site heading for a crash and burn or has just the hyper activity and bad practices of a couple people in the early stages and will the Networks (all of them not just the normal few) stand up and root out the bad eggs? This could easily be another cash back phenomenon and how will this effect traditional content based Affiliates who I consider myself to be and have in 2007 launched some 8 content based sites. Are these basically now going to be the feeding ground to get customers interested in a product only for commission to be lost as they head off to go via the cash back sites, or get a discount from a voucher site?

I guess time will tell but I certainly be watching with interest and I might just pitch in my ukcoupons.com site in to the mix, after all the last design is sitting complete in our website design area just needs some programming bits and bobs and a member of staff to run it, only problem I have is I like to enter fair level playing fields and won’t stand to be up against someone who is cookie stuffing as basically when you do that your cheating the Merchants, fellow Affiliates and the industry as a whole.

Now to get on with the harder task of writing decent articles that people actually want to read!