Please feel free to consult our affiliate compliance, affiliate marketing, and conference/forum resource lists below.
Benjamin Edelman, a Harvard Business School professor, was one of the first to actively fight against the use of adware and malware in affiliate marketing. He developed software that offered video proof of nonconsensual adware installations as well as documented their revenue streams. His website, benedelman.org, makes publicly available much of his work in these fields. More specifically, his articles on how spyware forces clicks, his well-illustrated examples of spyware at work, and his descriptions of how revenue streams operate in spyware driven affiliate marketing are invaluable resources for anyone managing an affiliate program. He also provides consulting services on spyware and adware to merchants.
Kellie Stevens, at AffiliateFairPlay.com, provides services that test, identify, and report potentially abusive affiliate behavior to merchants and affiliate managers. She is a frequent contributor to ReveNews and has helped countless advertisers uncover abusive affiliates in their programs through her thoughtful contributions on forums such as ABestWeb.
Adam Riemer is a well-known and successful affiliate, affiliate manager and consultant whose blog posts about the industry are essential for any newcomer. His series entitled “Are Your Affiliates Adding Value” provides great insight into ways to optimize an affiliate program as well as information for understanding what techniques do and don’t best serve merchants.
On the BrandVerity Blog we aim to keep our clients and other industry insiders appraised of the techniques that abusive affiliates use and the best ways of stopping them. It’s a source of information not only about our products, but trends in the industry, law suits impacting merchants and affiliate managers, and the cutting-edge ways that affiliate marketers scam the system. We believe that merchants and managers need to be just as informed as the bad guys, and we provide that information.
Shawn Collins, co-founder of Affiliate Summit writes an excellent blog on all issues affiliate. He frequently posts videos from prior Affiliate Summit sessions that are great resources for learning more about affiliate marketing. He also regularly highlights detailed findings from the annual AffStat survey of affiliate marketers that he runs.
Geno Prussakov, an affiliate management consultant and author of Affiliate Program Management: An Hour a Day, maintains a blog that provides fantastic information about structuring and maintaining an affiliate program. Advocating for affiliates, affiliate managers, and merchants, Prussakov’s blog comments upon the daily issues in the performance marketing field and advises all actors in the space on the best practices to gain the best results.
ClickZ provides a variety of resources for interactive marketers; from news to expert commentary, statistics to a job board, they aim to provide in-depth coverage of the interactive marketing field. ClickZ Tools, their White Papers, and the ClickZ Academy offer valuable informational and educational resources to merchants and affiliates.
FeedFront Magazine is the official magazine of Affiliate Summit. Co-edited and co-published by Missy Ward and Shawn Collins, it seeks to be on the forefront of affiliate marketing techniques and ideas. Frequently publishing work that highlights the cutting-edge in affiliate marketing, it’s an indispensible resource for anyone who hopes to truly understand not only where affiliate marketing is, but where it’s going.
IndustryPace is a blog run by Pace Lattin that discusses issues pertaining to affiliate fraud and compliance. Lattin has a background in law enforcement, interactive advertising, and affiliate marketing. Working with an attorney, he’s converting IndustyPace into a legal resource for affiliate compliance while also maintaining his work with Performance Marketing Insider and the Executive Council of Performance Marketing.
The Performance Marketing Association is a trade association that connects performance marketing industry leaders. It focuses on education and advocacy in and about the performance marketing industry. Their Anti-Fraud/Anti-Abuse Working Group aims to create policies and methods for the detection and elimination of online fraud and affiliate compliance.
Performance Marketing Insider publishes daily about performance and affiliate marketing. Run by Amy Capomaccio and Pace Lattin, the publication reviews affiliate networks, comments on the legal issues facing the field, and publishes “expert guides” for marketers seeking to improve their businesses.
ReveNews provides great coverage of online marketing industries including affiliate marketing, SEM, and e-commerce. Co-published by Angel Djambazov and Missy Ward, ReveNews features articles by many industry leaders, including Kellie Stevens, Sarah Bundy and Adam Riemer.
Sarah is an incredibly experience affiliate manager and founder of All Inclusive Marketing and Affiliate Management Trainers. Not only does she write on industry blogs such as ReveNews, she also is a frequent speaker at industry events. Her blog touches on a wide range of issues related to affiliate marketing and highlights strategies for effectively working with affiliates.
Abestweb is one of the oldest and certainly most successful forum dedicated to affiliate marketing. Abestweb features an Affiliate Managers Only forum that contains great discussions around various shady affiliate practices.
AM Days is the newest affiliate conference, but the first and only affiliate conference to focus on the needs of affiliate managers. The sessions planned for the inaugural conference in San Francisco go into the greatest depth on compliance issues of any conference yet.
The first and biggest affiliate conference continues to get bigger year after year. Affiliate Summit features a wealth of sessions targeted at training affiliate marketers across the skill spectrum. Affiliate Summit also proves to be the central event for advertisers to find affiliates and vice versa.