If you only get one or two complaints, it’s probably not spam-the complainants might simply have signed up for an email list and forgotten all about it. You will know when one of your affiliates is spamming, because you will get anywhere from 10 to 100 complaints in the same day all regarding the same URL. The best thing to do in this case is to immediately terminate or disable the account of the affiliate URL that was spammed.

5.4 Managing and tracking your affiliate programs

The key to any business is to promote your products and services to people who need them. Your affiliate business is no different. In order to earn commissions you must put your products in front of the people who need them. The beauty of marketing affiliate programs is that it is anybody’s ball game. This is the one place you can burrow deep into your own niche and stick it to the so-called 'big wigs'.

You may create your own affiliate program or you may promote other popular affiliate programs that are related to your product or service. The best way to manage and track affiliate programs is by creating your own affiliate program website. This is where you can list all your affiliate programs.

Staying Organized

There are many affiliate networks that provide multiple affiliate programs and merchants. Keeping a track of all affiliate programs in a single network is easy. You would generally be given one username and password as well as a single interface that controls all the programs. However, if you have many of your own affiliate programs or you promote several stand-alone affiliate programs from your website, the task of staying organized becomes a bit more complex.

There are many software programs available on the Internet that organize and keep track of all data associated with affiliate programs. Some of these are My Affiliate Program 2000 and Affiliate Assistant 1.0. These programs maintain databases pertaining to information about all your affiliate programs. A typical database would consist of the following fields:

• Program Name
• Date joined or created
• Contact Name
• URL
• Email Address
• ID
• Password
• 1st Tier Percent
• 1st Tier Sale
• 2nd Tier Percent
• 2nd Tier Sale
• Total Income
• Additional comments

Once the program information has been entered, you can add information about individual sales made and checks received. The program then keeps track of sales to date, amount collected and receivables. Besides, some of the advanced software programs also provide analysis and comparison tools for all affiliate programs. If you take the time to input collected data about clicks, sales, and page views, impressions, emails sent etc. from your various campaigns and enter all of it into the program, it will show you:

• Click to Sale Ratios
• Impression to Sale Ratios
• Amount Earned Per Impression
• Amount Earned Per Click
• Apart from these are a few other tips that might help you manage your affiliate programs.

Always ensure that your website is up and running. On a Daily basis type your URL into your browser's address bar, refresh the page and find out. The danger in not knowing that your site is down comes when you are running a pay per click advertising campaign. The click costs add up whether your site is functional or not. If your site is down, you are paying for advertising, but no one is buying.