Today I would like to share with you a sad story about affiliate marketing. A story of commission theft.

Some time ago a well known marketer invited people on his list to promote a new product he was launching and offered a 100% commission on the front end offer. The Rapid Action Profits script was used to manage the affiliate program.

Well, I joined his affiliate program and sent out emails to my list recommending his product. I also promoted it through various other advertising methods. It was a good product with a highly converting sales page and I quickly made a few sales so I felt I could earn some nice commissions and kept promoting it for a while. Strangely, in the next three weeks not a single sale occurred and I started wondering what had suddenly gone wrong with the promotion methods I was using.

Then I decided to test my affiliate link. Big surprise! I opened the sales page, clicked on the order button just to find out that it wasn’t going to my Paypal account but to the marketers’ Paypal account. I asked some friends of mine to do it too and the exact same thing happened: my affiliate link was no longer working for me, it was working to fill the marketers Paypal account… Out of my efforts, of course.

Affiliate management systems like the $7 Script, Rapid Action Profits and others have a feature that allows the owner of the product to determine the percentage of sales that will be credited to an affiliate. This percentage can go from 0 (zero) to 100(hundred) percent. There is also what is called alternating payments (Rapid Action Profits). The merchant gets the first sale to his Paypal account (no payment to affiliate). From that point on, the system alternates payment between the affiliate’s Paypal account and the merchant’s account. So what you are being paid is a percentage of the number of sales rather than a percentage of the sales dollars on each sale.

The affiliate makes the full selling price on 2 sales out of 4 if the commission rate is set to 50%.  He makes the full selling price on 3 sales out of 4 if the commission rate is set to 75%.

And here is where you must be cautious: a dishonest marketer can initially set up a 75% or 100% commission to excite you into promoting his product. Then after a few sales have been made he changes that percentage to 25% (or even ZERO) and you keep spending time and eventually money sending traffic to his website expecting to earn affiliate commissions but in fact he is the one who makes all the profit.

The worst thing is that you’ll never find out when a dishonest merchant is stealing your commissions, unless you periodically test your affiliate link. That’s quite easy to do with the $7 script: when you click on the Order button it must go to your Paypal account. If it doesn’t, someone is cheating… But there is no way of checking it with the alternating payments system used with the Rapid Action Profits script.

So be careful when promoting these “instant commission” products. Frequently test your affiliate link by clicking on the order button. If you actively promote a product using methods that are proven to generate sales but no sales occur, it may be a sign that there is something wrong with the way the affiliate program was set up by the merchant. If you become suspicious, stop promoting that product.

That’s exactly what I did. Well, I took it a little further: I will never ever promote any of this marketer’s products again.

P.S.: If you think you are safe selling products from ClickBank here’s some bad news: cheating vendors have been reported at ClickBank too. So I recommend that you do periodically test your ClickBank affiliate links by clicking on the order button of your affiliate page. Your ClickBank ID(nickname) should be showing at the bottom of the order page. If it isn’t, then you are not getting credit for the sale.