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This morning I found an email in my spam from somebody I don’t know telling me his ‘good news’: that starting next month TradeDoubler.com will take over exclusive rights to a programme I have been making good money from on Commission Junction (CJ).

For me as an affiliate marketer this was terrible news with a triple whammy:

1                    TradeDoubler keep the money I earn a whole month longer than CJ before they pay me.

2                    I need to edit all of my websites that display these ads to replace them with new affiliate links and images.

3                    Software I use to accurately target landing pages to offers my visitors are looking for does not work with TradeDoubler.

That’s not to mention the hassle of signing up to yet another network – with yet another minimum payout level, and more legal documents and paperwork.
Maybe no big deal once you are making lots of $ – but definitely something to try to avoid when you are starting out.
Working with 10 networks each with a $100 minimum payout means you could reach $999 of total sales income and still not get paid a cent!

Welcome to the world of affiliate marketing and learning all of the ways people can avoid paying you the commission you have worked so hard to earn.

Let’s start with the Network Contracts

Almost all of the ‘big guys’ have contracts that give affiliate marketers almost no rights at all. And the smaller networks do much the same – like an ‘industry standard’.
Do something they don’t like and they have the legal right to keep all of the money you have earned – their decision with no right of appeal to anyone else.
Looking at it from their point of view, they do have real problems: I have met people who ‘just click on a few of their adsense links’ to see they work. Well that is nothing short of theft – and you can’t blame Google for needing to come down hard.

So just make sure you follow the rules – including ones that restrict the way you get visitors and avoid using keywords you are not allowed to use.

Supplier Contracts

Like the network contracts, the supplier contracts generally allow them to make changes at will – including payout $ or % of sales, how long your cookies remain etc.
Your only option is stop promoting – but all your hard work getting links and setting up your site will be wasted!

Tracking and your ‘cookies’

When somebody clicks on an affiliate offer link on your site one of the things that happens is that it puts a ‘cookie’ on your visitors’ PC that has to still be there if and when they actually order something you should get commission for.
How long your cookie remains depends not only on the maximum number of days it was programmed to stay there, but whether something happens to delete it.

If a competitive affiliate link, for the same offer, gets clicked after yours – that will replace your cookie.
If your visitor clears the cookies from her PC – bang goes your cookie.
If the affiliate offer you are promoting hijacks your sale to capture your visitor’s details for their list, then sends a series of emails from their autoresponder – with new links to their offer? You should sign up to their list to see if anything they do removes your cookie from your PC when you finally try to order.

Ideally you should get them onto your own list with a series of emails containing links to the buying page.

In other words, anything you do as an affiliate – setting up websites, getting links and banners, driving traffic and promoting offers – is all outside of your control.

The only way out is to start getting control of all this chaos by owning products or services that you can promote yourself and allow other affiliates to promote for you.