Once you launch your affiliate program and affiliates start to sign up to promote it, it’s in your best interest to manage them from the start. Although you usually have the option to automatically approve them, you should be checking up on each of them to ensure the success of your program and business.

With the amount of spam that’s going on with the internet, the FTC is making marketers responsible for the actions of their affiliates. If your affiliates are promoting using illegal methods, that will reflect on you and can cost you money in the end.

You'll have hundreds of affiliates sign up for your program. Hobbyists, spammers, webmasters and hopefully, even quality marketers. It's extremely important that you review each affiliate to start and on a regular basis to ensure the methods they are using to promote your product is acceptable to you, your company and most importantly, it’s legal.

4 Tips to help you screen and recruit affiliates:

1. Require all new affiliates to have an active web site. If they say they’re promoting through email leads and have no lead capture program in place they’re probably buying leads and are not marketing to true opt-in leads.

2. You want the affiliate’s site and content to be relative to your products or services.

3. The affiliate’s site should have appropriate levels of content and not just one page of text. Look for additional links to articles on that domain. Google then sees this as a content site.

4. Content infringement. Be very clear with your affiliates as to what content they can use from your website and in what manner it can be used. Also, ensure that these guidelines are clearly visible when the affiliate signs up or enters the member’s area of your site.

What to look out for:

Affiliate fraud has been increasing over the last several years, with so many new unassuming marketers jumping online. This is another key reason to screen your affiliates on a regular basis. With fraud, there are two main types:

Malware - Some affiliates out there have developed software that is installed on a machine, normally as part of a free download. When someone clicks on the affiliate link, the true affiliate ID is replaced with the fraud link.

Fake purchase - If you‘re selling a high value product that carries a larger than normal price tag, it will potentially payout large commissions for affiliates. You may notice some unusual names signing up, and then using stolen or fake credit card information to purchase products using their own links. If you’re suspicious, track the affiliate and see if there’s pattern, the sooner you clean them out the better.

Once you’re setup and have a screening process in place, the next most important factor is communication. Communicating with affiliates will make you money…period. Good affiliates are usually busy, at times they can easily forget about certain affiliate services and products. As time goes by, your offers can wind up less in less prominent areas of their websites or even accidentally deleted.

It's extremely important to stay in contact with all your affiliates, but even more so with the top producers. Don’t wait for them to contact you, by taking the time to contact them, you are showing that you are interested in the partnership and you care about them and your business.

You don't need a new product as an excuse to contact your power affiliates. Even if it's just a quick note to ask if they need anything to help them, what problems they see or how they feel the product is converting. All this information is welcome to them and is invaluable to you. Reward them for increased sales and they’ll work harder, this is how both parties win.

Managing a successful affiliate program is not an easy task and it’s not recommended that you fully automate it, you have to get involved. Happy affiliates are more productive, and the more money they make – the more money you and your company makes, which is why affiliate marketing is the ultimate joint venture.