I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to attend over 10 Affiliate Summit conferences and can say without reservation that I have gotten my money’s worth out of every one of them. Whether you are just starting affiliate marketing and need a little education or have been doing it for a long time and want to grow your business, there is something for you at Affiliate Summit.
Affiliate Summit East 2012 is going to be held August 12-14 at the Hilton New York in New York City. Although the agenda is just starting to take shape, I’ve looked through the list of people who applied to speak and have no doubt that there will be a wealth of information in the sessions. Add to that the Meet Market, Exhibit Hall, and networking opportunities and you will not be disappointed if you attend. Do a quick search for Affiliate Summit wrap-up posts and you will see that people rave about it year after year. [click to continue…]
Affiliate Programs with Disney Merchandise
Sometimes as affiliate marketers we feel like we are stuck promoting specific merchants, even when we think the terms of those merchants are not exactly “affiliate friendly.” It may be that the commissions are low or that the cookies are short. Or maybe we just cannot get the attention of the affiliate managers when we have problems. If the merchant fits our niche well, do we just accept the terms and promote anyway? Do we give up on the niche? I don’t think we do either. Instead, we get creative and look for alternatives.
One of the merchants that I hear a lot about (because of my own personal interests and those of my friends) is Disney. There have been a lot of complaints in forums about the Disney Store affiliate program as well as the Disney Movie Club affiliate program (which I do not think is even managed by Disney and shows up on a lot of CPA networks). It’s the perfect example of an opportunity to find alternatives because there is no shortage of Disney merchandise, especially when you widen your search. Here are some great merchants to look at not just for Disney but for any niche you want to find alternatives for. [click to continue…]
The other day Nathan Smith from Zynali Marketing Solutions commented on my “When Pinterest Met Affiliate Marketing” webinar post about how Pinterest was starting to strip the tags out of Amazon affiliate links. Shawn Collins tested it out and verified it. However, he was able to go in and edit the link properly. Today Shawn reported that all of his Amazon links on Pinterest are now going to the “spam page” notification below.
Clicking through other people’s links, it looks like Pinterest is temporarily blocking all Amazon links as spam. Interestingly, I used PrettyLinks to build a redirect for an Amazon link using my www.tricia.me domain. Pinterest still recognized the final destination (Amazon) domain as “spam” and killed the link. Although it’s possible that it is just a glitch, this raises some big flags for affiliate marketers using Pinterest.
- Pinterest can at any time block any domain and render everything that you have pinned from that domain useless. Be careful how much time you spend pinning links to other sites because in one flip of a switch they can all go dead.
- Pinterest is clearly watching for too many pins from one source. Don’t get your own domain flagged for spam for having too many spammy pins.
- Use redirects for all affiliate links. You can always direct the links to another domain from the back end if the end domain does get blocked. You’ll just need to find the same product through a different merchant.
- Although this will probably get switched back because Amazon needs to place nice with Pinterest, it is likely that Pinterest will continue to strip out the affiliate links. Pinterest is onto affiliate markets and can very easily strip our coding from naked links. It would not be hard for them to do a search and replace of our affiliate codes for any network and substitute them with their own if they want.
There isn’t any reason that we all can’t participate in Pinterest in different ways to boost our traffic and our revenue. But Pinterest is not going to allow affiliate marketers to ruin their site (and should not!). Are you an affiliate, merchant, or OPM using Pinterest to build your business? How far should Pinterest go to protect itself from us?
Over the last month I have spoken and written frequently about my Mastermind Group. I’ve been fortunate enough to be learning from and working with Todd Farmer and Eric Nagel for about 15 months. For the first year we met once a week as a traditional Mastermind Group. Around our one year anniversary, we spoke about the topic at Affiliate Summit. On that day things took a different turn for us when we decided to expand our relationship to create a site together. Although we have kept it all under wraps until now, Eric did tease about it a little bit in his post Pros and Cons of Working Together. We’re finally ready to spill the beans!
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The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced today that it has resolved its first deceptive advertising action against an entity described as an “Affiliate Network.” The settlement with the COPEAC network (known to affiliate marketers as a “CPA Network”) was the first of its kind since the FTC began cracking down on false or deceptive advertising by affiliate marketers. Whereas previously the merchant was held liable for the actions of the affiliates, this time the affiliate network itself was implicated both for its own actions and those of its affiliates.
Some key takeaways from this announcement:
- The actions were regarding health-related claims on affiliate sites (acai berry and colon cleanse) that were made to look like news sites.
- The actions were instituted as a result of consumer complaints.
- The actions were settled by a consent decree that the FTC and the defendants entered into rather than a full litigation of the cases.
- Affiliate Network was defined as “any person who provides any Defendant with Affiliates for an Affiliate Program or whom any Defendant contracts with as an Affiliate to promote any good or service.” This would mean that CPS networks are included as well as CPA networks.
- “Endorsement” was defined as “any advertising message…that consumers are likely to believe reflects the opinions, beliefs, findings, or experience of a party other than the sponsoring advertiser.”
- “Material connection” was defined as “any relationship that materially affects the weight or credibility of any endorsement and that would not reasonably be expected by consumers.”
- As in past FTC documents, we see the language that the “endorser” must disclose “clearly and prominently” the “material connection.“
- The Defendants will have to submit to the FTC certain documentation for any company that they might have an ownership interest in that would be impacted by the settlement compliance obligations for the next twenty years.
Although this situation was definitely an egregious one because it was clearly false advertising of unproven claims and was made to look like legitimate news, it does raise issues about the extent to which affiliate networks will be liable alongside affiliates and merchants who engage in these practices. In addition, it reiterates some of the things that the FTC has said in the past. Namely, the FTC is not out looking for sites that fail to disclose affiliate links. Instead, it is relying upon consumer claims to bring the sites to their attention. When the sites are brought to their attention, the FTC looks to the issues of “clear and prominent” disclosure of material relationships.
Do you think that this will bring about a change in the way that affiliate networks work with affiliates and merchants? At a minimum, I think that the networks need to:
- Include disclosure language in their network agreements
- Link out to the official FTC guidelines on the issues
- Monitor the types of merchants that are joining their networks, in particular those most susceptible to false advertising claims like health and beauty merchants
- Stay clear of creating landing pages and PPC ads themselves that might trigger closer scrutiny of themselves rather than just the actions of the affiliates.
The water is still murky but we all need to do what we can to make sure that we are not on the receiving end of one of these FTC actions because they threaten not only current revenue but apparently the business that we do for decades to come.
