How to Avoid the Affiliate Program Traps

PART I

[PART I] [PART II]

When you're looking at a new affiliate program, what are some of the things you consider before you decide to sign up for the program?

Most webmasters inspect the ad formats offered by the affiliate program, the ad's CPC/CPM pay rates, the minimum payment threshold and if the aforementioned aspects look relatively reasonable, these people will sign up!   Unfortunately, most affiliate programs, especially the small, non-popular ones usually tend to yield very low earning rates for most websites and the owners of these websites have no choice but to abandon the program and seek for new ones.   The webmasters who waste the  time and efforts involved in such a fruitless ad program have fallen into the infamous "Affiliate Program Traps!".

Question: How do we avoid falling into these traps? 

Answer: By setting by a guideline for ourselves to consider before we set up new programs.

What are some of the things that may cause your website to yield less than desired earnings?  If you were one of those unfortunate website owners, you must have wondered, "whatever happened to my thousands of daily visitors, how come the affiliate program's ad system only recorded a couple of hundred visitors?"  The reason behind the myth is rather simple actually, a lot of your web traffic were disregarded by the affiliate program purposely.  But you really can't blame these programs, they actually have claimed to you that web traffic originating from certain geographic regions are NOT counted.  Before you ask where this particular disclaimer might be, look in the affiliate program's "terms and conditions". These terms and conditions may look like boring legal documents but they're actually IMPORTANT program attributes that you should look into.  Be ware that certain evil affiliate programs like to designate tiny font sizes for these vital disclaimers, so the first thing you should search for on an  affiliate program's website is the Terms and Conditions section!