Here are ten steps you can take to increasing affiliate commissions –

If you use affiliate marketing either to make extra cash as an affiliate or promote your products as a merchant, then choosing a reputable and reliable affiliate network that you know and trust will eliminate the possibility of fraud.

Though fraud can seep in anywhere and both affiliates and merchants can find themselves victims to these criminals.

Affiliate Marketing Fraud and the Merchant

As a merchant you have probably chosen affiliate marketing as it is an affordable way to target your specific target audience, unfortunately there are fraudsters who try and gain commission for marketing that they haven’t worked for.

As mentioned if you use a reputable affiliate network then they should monitor their affiliates and filter out any that are committing fraud within the network.

One of the most common types of affiliate marketing fraud is when you join for PPV (pay per view) advertising. When choosing PPV you design a advert or landing page which in turn pops up on a person’s computer when they type in keywords that you have chosen or URL’s you have chosen. By choosing the keywords and URL’s you are targeting your audience.

Often your pop up will appear using spyware and not what was agreed upon, therefore you are not targeting your niche market at all and are being charged each time your advert pops up. So when choosing PPV marketing, you need to confirm that the network follows strict guidelines to ensure that you are paying for what you expect to receive.

Another way you can experience fraud is when choosing PPC marketing (pay per click). In this form of marketing an affiliate will place a banner or email letter with a link to your website and every time someone arrives on your site through the link, the affiliate gets a commission. While this is a fruitful way to increase traffic, affiliates have designed programs whereby you will see traffic coming through the link but it is not people doing it, but actually a program.

Lastly affiliates, who are paid per sale, will often set up bogus credit card information and buy the products themselves in order to get the commission. You will send the products off to the designated address only to find that the payment hasn’t gone through or the address is false. This is why you always need to check the IP address against the credit card or delivery information; you will often find the IP address will show in a completely different country to the credit card and delivery.

Affiliate Marketing Fraud and the Affiliate

As an affiliate you strive to promote peoples websites in an attempt to make extra cash. Often you will see sites offering you to apply and make money without any work required you immediately know these are scams. There is no way you can make money in the marketing industry without hard work.

Another scam experienced by affiliates is networks that suddenly suspend or cancel your account just before payment or have constant technical issues when you try and request a payment. Stop working through these sites immediately they are a scam.

More often than not the reputable affiliate networks will not require that you pay a signing up fee, they should take a percentage of each commission made to make their money to maintain the site. Any networks wanting upfront payment should be researched with caution.

Not all affiliate networks are scams or have fraudulent activity in their network; the reputable ones will have a team who are constantly scrutinizing the work sent out by affiliates to ensure that everything is done according to their strict terms and conditions.