Beware of Affiliate Spamming!

Affiliate Spam - Users Beware!

The modern variation of the practice of paying finder’s-fees for the introduction of new clients to a business, is a popular method of promoting Internet businesses called, ’affiliate marketing’. An affiliate marketer is paid for every visitor, subscriber, or customer provided to an Internet business because of his efforts. There are several ways to generate money in affiliate marketing, for example, they can use any of the following: Pay per Click (PPC), Pay per Lead (registrant) or by commission from sales Pay per Sale.

You can see where an affiliate marketer would be sorely tempted to send out emails advertising the products he already promotes and makes money on. SPAM was the result from this, contributing to the deciding factor to the anti-spam laws passed to help prevent it. There is a strict fine to spammers and in addition to this, there is now a penalty for any merchant that is associated with spammers, making them accountable too. So caution is well advised to merchants.

Merchants who are considering adding an affiliate strategy to their online sales channel, should research the different technological solutions available to them. Now that affiliate marketing has grown, a good number of affiliate merchants now have updated their terms and contracts to safeguard against spamming. There are several types of affiliate marketing management resources available, such as: hosted services, standalone software, shopping carts with affiliate features and even affiliate third party networks.

Spamdexing is the practice of deliberately creating web pages, which will be indexed by search engines in order to increase the chance of a website or page being placed close to the beginning of search engine results, or to influence the category to which the page is assigned.

Since people usually use anti-spam software programs, marketers are debating over the affiliate practice of Spamdexing, and many have change their method from sending spam emails to generating large amounts of automatically generated web pages, with different niche keywords and optimizing their sites through search engines. This is sometimes referred to as spamming the search engine results. The goal of search engines is to provide the user with high quality search results by them entering in keywords or phrases, and spam is one of the biggest threats to this effort.