Two Types of Advertisers That Affiliate Marketers Should Avoid Like The Plague

As an affiliate marketer there is nothing worse than working hard to drive traffic to an advertisers web site, to then lose that commission to the advertiser advertisers are doing things to seriously reduce the commissions that their affiliate partners should be making. Below are two things to watch for.

Call Now To Place Your Order

Some advertiser like to give their customers the option to place orders by phone. They usually make their customers aware of it with a large graphic at the top of the site. Unfortunately some affiliates don’t have a system in place to track where the traffic originated from. So you could be sending traffic to an advertisers and never see the commission from the sale.

Many jewelry web sites have a system to track where the affiliate link came from when people order by phone after going to the web site. Double check with advertisers that have order by phone options to see if they have similar tracking methods.

Bait and Switch

Some very large companies (I’m not going to name names) use a tactic that many affiliate marketers would consider bait and switch.

Here’s how it works. The affiliate sends traffic to the advertisers web site only to have that traffic leave to another site owned by the same advertiser. The advertiser will have one main web site and then a few smaller web sites with affiliate programs. At the top of the advertisers smaller sites are a large graphic with a link to shop at the main web site. Say good-bye to your commission.

When deciding what affiliate programs to join, watch out for these two issues that could seriously hurt your commissions.

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