subject: Affiliate Marketing - Following The Rules [print this page] Many people today are catching on to the fact that working for yourself as an affiliate marketer is a great way of having your own business. But working in any business requires that you must follow rules and regulations in order to protect yourself and others from bad practice, poor quality and legal problems and having your own business as an affiliate marketer is no different, therefore it is very important to understand what these rules are and how you can keep track of them.
Affiliate marketing is not a difficult thing to do but you will soon find that there are many companies that offer affiliate programs and they will all have rules that you must adhere to; often times they are the same rules but you still need to be very careful to read the terms and conditions thoroughly. In the vast majority of cases, these rules are not difficult to adhere to and, in fact, make perfect sense. Difficulties can become apparent if you find yourself an affiliate to numerous merchants who may apply a mixture of different rules.
This article will cover a few of the more common areas that need to be understood when agreeing to become an affiliate for a product before you start promoting it on the web.
For instance, some companies do not allow you to mention the brand names of the products that they sell anywhere on your your own site to having a name of the particular market within your domain name. If your site is already up and running you may run into problems if you cannot market that particular merchants products or services.
Some merchants just do not like the competition from their affiliates and you have to agree not to have a PageRank higher than theirs when certain keywords are used. For instance, if you plan to promote dog collars and you wanted to become an affiliate for Woof dog collars and they had this policy installed, your website would not be allowed to come above the official Woof dog collar website in the search engine results when dog collars or Woof dog collars is used as the search term. After all, they don't want to be paying you all that commission if they can be top and grab it all for themself!
The best way to solve the problem of knowing what you can and cannot do for each merchant you are promoting for is to use a spreadsheet to keep track of everything. That way, you can easily remind yourself of what you can and cannot do and avoid any potential law suits or lost earnings.
There is also software available for affiliate marketers (just type in 'affiliate marketing software' into your search engine) and this will help you to keep track of everything very easily.
When learning to become an affiliate marketer, it is very important to learn from those who understand the process and how frustrating it can be as a newbie to get those first programs creating profit for you.
