I found when I used services like that in the past that less people sent mail.

My assumption was that the sketchy affiliates moved elsewhere, because they knew somebody was watching.

Unsub and LashBack wouldn’t have helped them in this situation since they didn’t do the mailings.

They also have 50k affiliates, chances are more than good they will miss a few affiliates breaking the terms.

Here are some things I’ve done in the past:

• manually approve affiliates and perform due diligence on them
• if you auto-approved affiliates in the past, audit them all and remove any that you would not have manually approved
• subscribe to all affiliate mailing lists
• include language in your agreement that they forfeit all pending commissions if caught breaking any of the terms
• use services like UnsubCentral and LashBack

The truth is no merchant can totally control what their affiliates are doing to generate leads.

The most they can do is to shut the affiliate down if they are aware of their malpractices.

We as affiliate marketers have or aim to have our own product to market.

While we are responsible for informing potential affiliates that we do not tolerate spam, apart from what i have highlighted above, is there any real action we can take to stop our affiliates from using spam?

As I mentioned, I am certainly not a legal scholar, nor do I claim to be.

That’s why I referenced an actual legal scholar, Anne Mitchell, in a subsequent post on the matter.

As far as my right to form an opinion, it’s the same right that you exercised by anonymously disparaging me.

Yeah, First Amendment.

Anyhow, based on the reporting from Direct Magazine, affiliates of Impulse Media Group sent spam, the company was just not held responsible.

Since I’m so off base, I’d love to hear your insight.