It is very important that when you buy our affiliate software that you create an affiliate program agreement for your affiliate users. This document will clearly define the “do’s” and “don’ts” in terms of your affiliate marketing program. The reason to have the agreement clearly stated is to avoid misunderstandings about your affiliate program and what your users can and cannot do. Although there are a large percentage of affiliate programs out there with no agreements, this is not the best practice.
One reason that there may be a lot of affiliate programs out there with no agreement is because of the legal cost that is involved in getting a lawyer to help you draft an agreement. However, the thing you could do is look for general affiliate agreements out there or look at what your competition has and modify their agreements. Then you can take a document to your lawyer to review, rather than having him write one from scratch. This could save you money that you have to pay your lawyers if you are on a small budget. One advantage to having an agreement is that you show your clients that you are serious about your business and it is another way to build trust.
When you put together your affiliate agreement, it should not simply say things like: “We guarantee your customers will love our software” or “We are featured here”. It should be an agreement that clearly states what your affiliate user can and cannot do. For example, there are many affiliates that do not allow you to steal their brand identity when you are doing pay-per-click marketing. Since companies spend a lot of money building their brands, they do not want to get in a bidding war over their brands with the pay-per-click sites like Google. Another common provision that affiliates will add to agreements is to prevent merchants from using their affiliate links to buy products and services for their companies. The reason this is important is because you do not want someone signing up for your affiliate program, just to save on their own purchase when they have no intention on marketing your products and services.
Therefore, I would suggest every business that has an affiliate program also have an affiliate program agreement to go along with your affiliate program. Does your company have an affiliate agreement?
Article written by Tariehk Geter, Education Manager of Omnistar Interactive
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