Sponsors who review your signup
 

Which can take up to 2 business days.
If i'm working on something i'm not gonna wait 2 days. Instead i'll sign up to a similar sponsor who will let me access the affiliate area right away.

Just a friendly tip.

I see both sides here - affiliate fraud is rampant these days, no 2 ways about it, so you have to weigh up the wait/immediate with whether they are gonna be fucked by a ton of fraud, and have to shut up shop. Imo, 2 biz days isn't that long a wait - SE traffic you have to obviously wait for, inhouse/submission/mailer traffic sure, you could send rightaway, but unless there's some kind of promo you (as in whoever) wants to jump straight in on, it's just one of those things in business.

Saying that, it is frustrating when you're in high work gear, and you want to crack straight on with something asap.

this aint 2007, good sponsors aren't going for a dime a dozen, if you want to promote the good shit you gotta play by their rules.

Yep.
And most likely get better conversion ratios.

I just move on and usually forget about them. I'm not very patient.

I manually review all new affiliate accounts at RadicalCash. Normally I try to contact the webmaster by ICQ/IM or email before approving the accounts. In some cases I never get a response, and the account never gets approved.

For every 10 affiliate signups we get, I approve maybe 2 of them. The fraud with affiliates is out of hand these days.

lots of sites have a dutch twink webmaster filter now. maybe that's whats going on.

I'm sure some sponsors do the same with our signups.

So 8 out of 10 people who sign up for your program are scammers?

And in the process sign up for all the same over promoted programs as all the other impatient webmasters out there.

Some things to speed the process would be:-

• Don't sign up with a gmail email account, use one that relates to real domain. That way we know you do actually own or control that domain.
• When asked for a domain that you own, pick a live one that shows some of what you do and the style you do it in, not the new one you are working on that has zero content.
• When the program owner or rep adds you to ICQ, APPROVE them, they're just trying to say "hi, how can we help?" and just check you are real, not waste a load of your time chatting.
• Imagine you are dealing with a human. "Gimme my free content" doesn't play quite as well as "hey man, like yer stuff, can I get access?"
• Telegraphing you have a short attention span doesn't inspire confidence. Good affiliates are hardworking, long term and patient in everything they do.

Don't forget that by keeping scammers and chatters out (for those who have this policy), it maintains the customers' faith in the product by not having any bad experiences and keeps conversions and member spending up. :thumbsup

And if the customers don't see any bad reviews on sites like ripoffreport, everyone wins.

The gmail thing is kinda retarded, I can see your point but a lot of webmasters use Gmail including me. I signed up for a certain sponsor using a domain email and eventually I dropped that domain...and then I couldn't change information in NATS because NATS would send the emails to a domain email that didn't exist anymore because I no longer owned the domain...which I then had to go through the trouble of trying to get in touch with the sponsor and having to scan my ID and a voided check to prove the account belong to me and to change payment info and email...because of shit like that I always use Gmail for all of my email.

Push the boat right out and spend $8 per year on a domain for the express purpose of having a non-free addy.

What SimonScans says is spot on :thumbsup

Theres no win in this scenario. Sponsors have to protect themselves and you wanna work. The best thing I can suggest is for the sponsors to have an ICQ that people can contact the reps after they sign up. Thats what we have our guys here do.

We don't auto approve, or ever will again. The scammers are running rampant in these tough times online. The good guys get caught in the net too, which sucks.

Mirror image of what our reps see here. We get maybe one good signup for each 5-6. The rest are fake/false info, or someone we don't want.

The problem is. If you sign up with a gmail account you might have exactly nothing to do with the domains you claim to own. I've had surfers sign up with gmail accounts who then put "twistys.com" as the domain. - just to get in to look at all the galleries in one easy spot. That's at one end of the spectrum, but at the other end you have scammers doing the same thing except they've gone to the trouble of picking a plausible looking affiliate domain run by another affiliate and then created a gmail that looks linked.

Can someone please explain how affiliate fraud works ? Not that I want to fraud, but I just don't get it.

Are we talking here about users who sign up to an affiliate only to view free content ?

kinda have to these days, its not worth the hassle of the fraud that would come in otherwise. but if you have been around a while all it normally takes is contacting them after you sign up and you usually get fast tracked.

it's an extra step, but can save you some time at least.

True dat.
:thumbsup

Especially considering the current banking climate. I doubt few are going to risk losing their merchant account(s), and having their business frozen up, for some impatient lone wolf affiliate. Regardless of the 'promises of traffic and riches'.

Due diligence is a bitch.

Only in the online world are such things considered "major inconveniences" by affilaites to verify someone's identity. In the real world, especially at most of our own banks, this is standard practice to have to show I.D. or proof. Just as if you changed your home/business mailing address or they do not match your documents. You would expect them to verify this accordingly.

:disgust

It's perfectly fine (with us at least) to sign up with a "real" email and then change it as soon as you get approved. I know its a pain, but connecting affiliates with some kind of reality before sending out payments is pretty much the only way we have of stopping some card fraud.

You can list the gmail as contact on the domain you sign up with. If it shows in a whois or is on the contact page of your site as the contact webmaster email address, that's good enough for me.

I also use gmail for everything. Found out recently you can get them to host the MX record for a domain, not just redirect mail from a real domain to a gmail account. It's free and whoops the ass of spam arrest.

i cant afford to spend $8 per year on a domain for the express purpose of having a non-free addy... :(

I personally don't mind an approval process of a day or two, especially if I know the content will make sales. I just avoid two things from sponsors:

1. Asking for my taxid/SSN before I've even made a sale.
2. Pre checked cross sales.

Either of those, I move right along.

They sign up, they send sales with a stolen card, they get paid for the sales before the charge is noticed, they disappear.

most programs have a waiting period before payouts go out regardless so I don't see how that changes things, the initial signup process is just a small part of the fraud checking process.

if you were being defrauded by a good percentage of people you would have just a thick of a screen I'm sure as well.

We manually approve to the content area within a few hours. If we approve. Affiliates can sign up with ccbill right away and start using some tools but we still check them out. You have to.

Noted.

I've never replied to a rep' who is pestering me as soon as I've joined their programme, not once in my life.

Jesus man, this is a mainstream program which is no better than 50 other programs offering the same products. Another program got my business. It's as simple as that.

So to those who say they need to do that. What can and will go wrong in 2 days if you let the affiliate in and don't have the time to screen him right away.
Is the amount of webmasters you lose because of letting them wait worth it? That's that really hard to believe. Like really.
You must have so many scammers signing up for your program who can cause major damage in 1 or 2 days to justify all the webmasters who signed up somewhere else.

I'm not naming names but for some sponsors who do this it's probably more about knowing what to set the shave on more than anything. Although they also know you won't send a bunch of charge backs or chat traffic either if they haven't approved you. Whereas if you did even the same day of joining no matter what you are going to cause them trouble even if they don't pay you for them.

2 days @ 10 fraud aff signups a day there's 20 fraudulent affs waiting to happen, go a week, or 2 weeks, and the numbers soon add up. It's not the 1 good aff, it's the 5 or 6 bad ones per good that are the problem.

signupdammit - why won't you name names?

:thumbsup Yep, agreed

There should be a 'pending sales' column until 'approved'.

But affiliates might not trust that. Imagine if you sign up to a program and you're not sure if they're dodgy or not, and you see your sales "pending". You might think you're not going to get that money, whereas seeing sales that are earned and in the bag makes you want to keep sending the traffic. In fact I'm sure some sponsors even credit sales to new affiliates just to encourage them to send more traffic. Doesn't work with me though as I haven't got any.

Two sponsors that i use have a lag where your payments are pending for 4 weeks and it works fine for me.

I know it's a hassle to wait to get your account approved, but personally I would NOT use a program that does not manually approve new accounts. I don't want to send traffic to a program that just allows everyone to send traffic, because they are much more likely to be hit with fraud, which can result in them getting into trouble with their bank, which can result in them closing down and me not getting paid.

I think times have changed. Most affiliate programs are not that desperate for sales anymore. They don't want to take any risks. A lot of programs now go for quality over quantity. They want to be able to chose with who they do business.
In the past everyone was going for the quick buck, just getting as many affiliates and as many sales as possible, while humping from processor to processor, from merchant account to merchant account. This was risky, stressful and made their businesses unstable and times have changed in regards to processing and merchant accounts etc. It's not the wild west anymore. Most programs that are still alive are in it for the long run. They don't need/want some shitty sales from some random webmaster from Ukrain with a free hosted blog, They want quality webmasters who they can trust and build a valuable relation with.

I'm definitely not patient when it comes to signing up for a sponsor and placing promo material (usually just trying to get linkcodes), if it's not email verify or at least somehow activated in a couple hours I don't even want to work with them then or thereafter.

If you can't activate my account within a day how are you ever going to be there when I need to talk to you about something important instantly or within the hour?

I guess I can understand the fraud issue but I refuse to accept it, handle all that on your own time, I'm trying to get things done now not days from now.

I agree... you check your stats and take action accordingly.

GFY... for example, only accepts email addresses from non-public emails. Programs could easily enforce that as well.