Affilate Fraud
If you don't outsource your affiliate marketing to an affiliate network, you can use some of the most common screening techniques in place, such as:
checking if the affiliate has an active Web site
checking if the site's content relates to what you're selling
checking if the affiliate's site is optimized accordingly for the above mentioned content
keeping in touch regularly with the affiliate.
If you have a CPC campaign in place, make sure you include some anti-fraud features, suck as cookies that can detect if a link was clicked on more than once from the same IP in a short interval. Such cookies will provide you with enough information to allow you to single out and eliminate unwanted fraudsters.
Even if it is more time consuming, you can go for manual approval of all the affiliate applications. This will allow you to review all the data provided by the applicants and immediately spot the "rotten apple" in the basket. You can even go as far as giving each applicant a phone call to see it they are real and if they mean business.
After carefully "trimming" the list of affiliate applicants, sort out the bad ones and add them to a red-flagged database for future reference. You never know when it may come in handy.
Also, join forums where you can discuss with fellow merchants various ways of putting into place anti-fraud affiliate programs, share opinions, filtering techniques, black list of fraudsters' URLs, IDs, etc. Communication is of utmost importance in this particular business.
