Affiliates - protect yourselves from this situation by selecting affiliate program carefully.

Ask yourself these questions.

Has site existed for more than a year? Is it clear what site is providing and are terms and conditions of affiliate program explained clearly and comprehensively in simple language? Are there good online reviews of program in websites or discussion forums? Does program provide realtime commission stats online? Are ready-to-use affiliate marketing tools available?

Shady Practice #2

Affiliates are sometimes guilty of misleading or false advertising - making claims or promises about product or services which are totally untrue or greatly exaggerated.

Shady Practice #3

Illegal use of logos, trademarks or other branding. This includes infringement of intellectual property rights and violation of copyrights.

Shady Practice #4

Spamming.

While legitimate affiliates are jumping through hoops to comply with can-spam laws, shady characters continue to find their way around it.

Shady Practice #5

Affiliate link hijacking is replacement of your affiliate id with hijacker's in affiliate link.

You don’t get your rightful commission - hijacker gets it instead by buying through his own affiliate link.

It's best if you can avoid displaying your affiliate link and affiliate ID in browser address bar.

One technique uses a zero-frame or invisible frame to make it appear you are sending visitors to a page on your website when, in fact, you are really sending them to your affiliate link.

To prevent hijacker from viewing web page's source code to see that you've loaded an affiliate link, use javascript encryption to scramble page code or software to prevent source code from being viewed.

Make no mistake about it...

In any area of human activity, particularly where there is money to be made, there will always be people who try to cheat, exploit gullible and do harm.

The proper way to engage in affiliate marketing is to act ethically, build a relationship of trust with your prospects and customers then provide value by consistently exceeding your customers expectations.

And this applies to any business either online or offline.

This is where real opportunity has come up for online newcomers. Most people put a lot of energy in finding "high paying" keywords or simply purchase a database of "high paying keywords", create a small website around keyword, put AdSense code in it and start generating traffic which might click on ad and expect to get paid high.

But here is real kicker! The amount which you get paid is dependent of 5 different factors. Some of factors are out of control of webmaster (you).

For example if a keyword phrase pays something around $14 to $15 per click. Most people think that even if they get a 1% click through rate, that is 1 person clicks out of 100 visiting their website, Google will put $14 in my account. Yes it's true, but not always!

The amount which you get paid, depends on which ad gets shown on your website. The ad which gets shown on your website is dependent upon relevancy and lot more other factors.

The true success with AdSense lies not on targeting only "high paying" keywords, but with focusing on creating highly informative content and getting repeat visitors. Google loves content. If you provide it on your website you will automatically get more visitors and increase possibility of high click through rate which leads to more income to you and Google.

So, learn to build traffic first and then fine tune your website with AdSense script to start earning immediately. The true success with AdSense is with generating content rich pages and attracting traffic. "High paying keywords" is a secondary factor with AdSense

Copyright 2005 Shrinivas Vaidya

AdSense is registered trademark of Google Inc.