Tony Wright has an excellent post up at SearchEngineLand on establishing search marketing rules for working with franchise organizations. Since affiliates are in some ways franchisees (and plenty of ways not), some of his guidelines are quite useful. He provides three rules:

We've gotten a number of questions about PoachMark identify affiliate ads. While some of our approach is proprietary, it is one major thing that we do that differentiates us from our competition.

Over the last few weeks, we've introduced several new features to PoachMark that have been consistently requested. Some of you are already using the new features, but we wanted to provide an overview in case you haven't seen them:

Jeremy Shoemaker pointed out this thread on Digital Point where an affiliate manager requested access to an affiliate's AdWords account.

Over the last two weeks, we've introduced several new features to PoachMark that have been consistently requested. Some of you are already using the new features, but we recognize that we need to do a better job consistently communicating new functionality:

Eric Goldman points to a recent ruling that declared purchasing an ad based on a keyword (a practice currently allowed by Google) to be a use in commerce.

Trademark use management remains one of the greater challenges for brands that maintain affiliate programs. Most of the sessions that I've been to so far touch on trademarks and their use/abuse at some point over the course of their talk.

A few months ago, Yahoo began running search ads with an icon that resembled Google's checkout icon.

The US district court in southern California recently granted an injunction against Navigation Catalyst (nofollow) and their bulk registrar Basic Fusion (nofollow). Navigation Catalyst is definitely among the larger domain companies and had engaged in heavy 'domain tasting', the registration of domain names to test them for traffic.

The judge in the 2004 lawsuit between Tiffany and eBay has finally ruled, dealing an important victory to eBay and providing a setback to Tiffany and other manufacturers that frequently find counterfeit goods on auction sites.