By James Woolley
It is a sad fact of life that not all companies that run their own private affiliate program are entirely honest with their affiliates. This is equally true in the forex niche as it is in any other niche. So why do they try and deceive their affiliates, and how can you spot if an affiliate program is not entirely trustworthy?
The reasons why they may be slightly deceitful is that they obviously prefer to keep as much cash for themselves, rather than paying out a percentage of each sale to their affiliates. In the forex niche this can be anywhere between 20% and 75% of the actual sale price, so there are clear motives for doing this.
One way to identify whether a company may not be giving you the affiliate commissions that you deserve is by looking at the conversion rate. The truth is that even the poorest quality products with badly designed sales pages can often generate a conversion rate of at least 1%. So if you are sending thousands of visitors to the sales page and only generating one or two sales, then they may not be giving you the credit for the sales you generate.
You ideally want to join a program where every visitor and every sale are recorded and viewable in your stats and reports page. One way to test this out is to obtain your affiliate link and click on it say ten times throughout the day. Then you can log in and see if these ten visits are recorded in your affiliate report. You could also pay a friend to buy the product you are promoting using your affiliate link to see if this sale does indeed show up in the stats page.
Another common tactic is to display a prominent opt-in form on the sales page in order to get leads and sell them the product in the autoresponder sequence. There’s nothing wrong with that providing this lead is cookied, because then you will get credit for any sales that may result from this. However a lot of companies keep all of these subsequent follow-up sales for themselves, which is definitely deceitful, because you’re the one that sent them these leads in the first place.
Finally one another way you can spot a deceitful forex affiliate program is by looking at how often you actually get paid. Thankfully there are very few companies that will refuse to pay out, but it can happen in some instances, particularly with companies you haven’t heard of before.
Similarly another tactic is to reduce your overall affiliate commissions, citing the reason that people have returned the product and asked for a refund. Now unfortunately you have no way of knowing whether or not these returns are genuine or not, so you simply have to take the company’s word for it.
So overall there are lots of ways that these forex affiliate program providers try and cheat their affiliates. However I should point out that the vast majority of these companies are completely genuine and treat their affiliates well with accurate statistics and prompt payments. As is always the case it’s always just one or two dodgy companies that give the rest of the affiliate marketing industry a bad name.
About the Author
James Woolley is both a forex trader and an affiliate marketer. Click here to read his forex affiliate program reviews and to see which programs he most recommends.
