Building a Community the "Return On Affiliate" way.

I think that all AM firms even in house programs run with a fair level of ethical marketing, I've never heard of an instance where any one of my peers and competitors is bidding on my brand name or anyone elses, not popping up banner, intercepting visitors and all the stuff that goes on to ambush the consumer. Well at least that was till this week, when in my mail box arrives the most disturbing news... some one was targeting our site with Adware... expecting it to be a competitor I was really surprised to find out that it was in fact one of the new "Affiliate Communities", obviously so starved of visitors and "community" that they decided that targeting AMWSO and a range of other Affiliate Marketing sites was the best way to grow the community.

Lets face it it's a kinda clever move as most Affiliate Managers run their machines free of all Adware so we're unlikely to ever see the ads, but then they forgot the nice folks over at Affliate Fair Play who install Adware for a living and stumbled upon this little act.

I fully understand the desperation of wanting to drive quality affiliates to a community, but heck, if a community can't build itself through having quality and ethics then who wants to be part of it anyway.

So Richard the Next time you want to advertise Return On Affiliate on someone elses site, try asking them first, I'm sure most people are more than happy to sell banner slots and even do exchanges at an ethical level.

One does have to wonder though...do you promote these adware practices to affiliates too?