Marketing is hard. It just is. From figuring out who your market is, to how to reach them. Then trying to balance that with the development side of things, patent processing, building a website, tweaking wording, budgeting, balancing the other business concerns, and family time, it's just hard.
Affiliate marketing isn't though. The premise is simple, set up a system so people can talk about you and then get compensated when someone who heard them talking about you followed a special link. If you found this page through one of those person's links and you get a license, they will get a cut.
There are sharks in every ocean though.
We've got our affiliate program set up. You can visit it here. Before you become an affiliate though, we have to approve you manually. We had this toggled by accident the first day, the first day where we had 15 accounts registered to be affiliates.
You can imagine our surprise. 15 within 24 hours with zero advertising? How is that? Well, fraud… that's how. Apparently, affiliate marketing is rife with fraudulent accounts and "click-bots" and based on how you set up your program, they can cost you tens of thousands an hour. Basically what these criminals do is use networks of virus-infected computers to "click" on your affiliate-penny-per-clink link, and drain your entire ad budget. Vicious right?
According to TrafficGuard/Juniper ad fraud will cost around $87 billion this year alone. One way to work around it is to only pay on conversion, (which is how we are set up). Once someone using your link converts and buys (a license in our case) you get $25. But this is also where the most vicious of these criminals come in: Identity thieves. These people use stolen credit card information to actually go through with a purchase! They walk away with $25 every time they do the thing.
And the victim? The victim sees the fraud and initiates a chargeback, and the merchant processor always takes the client's side. This cycle could happen hundreds of times an hour!
Now we have our program set up where we will manually verify every affiliate application. We put quite a bit of thought into this program. We encourage you to take advantage of it and appreciate you spreading the word. And to anyone reading this who is thinking about starting their affiliate program for their practice/product:
You're welcome.