Archive for the ‘Industry News’ Category

FTC Now Requires “Sponsored Post” Disclosure

News has broken today that the FTC is making a change to the “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising” for the first time in almost 30 years.

Here’s what you need to read:

“The revised Guides also add new examples to illustrate the long standing principle that ‘material connections’ (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers–connections that consumers would not expect–must be disclosed. These examples address what constitutes an endorsement when the message is conveyed by bloggers or other ‘word-of-mouth’ marketers. The revised Guides specify that while decisions will be reached on a case-by-case basis, the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.”

Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10367464-93.html

Failure to disclose payment terms can now result in an $11,000 fine. A drop in the ocean for many successful affiliates, but the deterrent itself will probably shave off more profits than the fine.

Now while this is obviously relevant to floggers, it applies pretty directly to those of us in the affiliate marketing blogosphere. Personally, I think it’s a welcome change. It was only last week with the re-design of this blog that I added an Important Information page to vent my own frustrations with the blogging for riches business plan.

There are bloggers out there – hot shot super affiliates – who will shotgun their readers with any crap that pays a commission. It only takes one reputation built on sand and naive new marketers will buy in to just about anything. While some financial disclosure isn’t going to stop that, it will hopefully expose a level of doubt in what some of these super affiliates will sell their word for.

As far as flogging goes, I can’t see this change making life any more difficult than it already is. If you’re a flogger, you should already be painting your pages in an endless wall of disclaimers. It’s necessary to cover your back. As far as I can see, most of the high exposure flogs are already small printing in the fact that they’re paid a commission.

The real problem for the FTC is policing these changes. How do you tell the difference between word of mouth friendly praise and a second motive of money changing hands? Sure there are affiliate links being dropped, but it wouldn’t surprise me if some of these sketchy companies started implementing a new off-site method of tracking. A “we’ll catch your referral on the other side” type mentality. It’s also pretty damn hard to nail a Paypal transaction on a sponsored post. How are they going to bust these private sponsorship agreements?

Good luck to the FTC. You’ve got your work cut out.

Acai Berry Flavoured Shit Hits The Fan In Illinois

Another day, another dose of acai berry backlash in the press.

I was taking a read over Wickedfire when I caught sight of this thread. It seems that the Attorney General in Illinois has decided to take firm action against acai berry floggers. This news is particularly significant as it involves both the advertisers and a couple of well known affiliates.

Read the article here: Attorney General Madigan Files Suit Against Acai Berry Companies

Now there’s a bunch of issues that come to light from this news. Firstly, you’ve got the whole drama of fake celebrity endorsements.

Not to criticize fellow affiliate marketers too heavily, but if you buy a domain with Oprah’s name attached – and promote a rebill as if it fell out of her fat ass – you deserve all the trouble you get. I’ve invented my fair share of sales stories, but I’ve stopped short of imaginary Hello magazine endorsements. It’s just a legal minefield. I’m a pretty strong advocate of aggressive marketing. But that’s not aggressive marketing. It’s barely even marketing.

If Viagra Plus posted my smiling face and promised the world “As Seen On Finch’s Bedside Table”, I’d be pretty fucking heartbroken. Somebody else’s business is somebody else’s business. Sure, half of America is dumb and willing to buy anything Oprah shills on her talk show. But you can’t go sticking your wang in other people’s pies. Fake celebrity endorsements are the sort of harmful and misleading advertising that are ultimately gonna come back to haunt this industry. For some, clearly, it already has.

The second issue raised in the lawsuit – and arguably the bigger problem for most affiliates – is the action threatened against flogs. Most media publications have been pretty slow to “get” what a flog is all about. But in the latest round of lawsuits, the AG Lisa Madigan has gone out of her way to directly implicate these kinds of websites.

No doubt, widespread legal action against floggers would dump the cat amongst the pigeons. Not just because the acai berry market is so dominated by this kind of marketing, but because it’s spreading so rapidly to other niches and verticals.

Flogging for bizopps, flogging for anti-ageing…Christ, even flogging for dating (Try it, you’d be surprised!). If this form of marketing becomes a process of walking the legal tightrope, we’re going to see a lot of movement and a lot of top earners rethinking their marketing ways. Personally, I see that as a good thing. A flog, when you break it down, is pretty basic and doesn’t require much “level of entry”.

So what are we going to see next? If advertisers get hit for using fake celebrity endorsements – where does their next logical step take them?

How about…ACTUAL celebrity endorsements?

It’s happening already. I got a tip-off from one of my affiliate managers today about a muscle-building rebill that is apparently enjoying quite a lot of success on Advaliant. The catch? It’s genuinely endorsed by Stephan Bonnar. If you don’t know, Bonnar is a hulked up dude from UFC who looks like the sort of wet dream the target market for the offer would have.

Most of the top advertisers can afford to pay for a genuine celebrity endorsement. And I think this is what we’re going to start to see in the future. The celebrities don’t have to be A-List. As long as the name rings a bell in the consumer’s head, that’s all that matters. Credibility only has to be subtle to be effective.

Affiliate marketers have been running wild with fake celebrity testimonials for as long as I can remember now. The best way to sustain the tactic in the long term is to take the method and make it legit. Pluck a C-List celebrity out of obscurity and create some consumer trust.

If you’re sitting there now, scouring Google Image search for Oprah pics to throw in to your flog, stop for a second and think about the long term repercussions of what you’re doing. You’re not really marketing. You’re making up bullshit lies to sell a bullshit product. I can live with the bullshit product. But trademark infringements and slinging on somebody else’s rep – that’s no way to skin the cat.

Good luck to those affected by the latest round of lawsuits. I’m kinda anticipating a scapegoat to be made at some point in the near future. Best to comb your facts from your fiction to make sure that scapegoat doesn’t become you.

For clarity, I do not use Viagra Plus.

Yahoo To Crack Down; How Doomed Are You?

Affiliates make Baby Jesus cry, didn’t you know?

Google caught some headlines last month for banning a bunch of affiliates on the back of a rebill offer. Now word has caught the wind that Yahoo is about to drop an axe on the same bruised and battered floggers. It was supposed to be “Black Friday” for affiliates. Well, a few days have passed, and it seems that a whole bunch of guys are scraping by undetected from the alleged editorial clampdown.

Some very reliable sources have stated that the “Yahoo slap” is only a matter of time.

If you’re one of the guys who got dislocated from Google, you’ve probably taken a rapid interest in Yahoo. It’s decent volume at decent value and it’s self-serve.

A lot of affiliates are going to be pissed off to hear it, but the whole self-serve marketing strategy is about to bite the bullet on this one. If you’re really set on selling rebills, you’re gonna have to get used to breaking the budget on CPM based display ads. It’s just inevitable.

Okay, so when Yahoo finally does clamp down on the rebill offers (and they will), you’re gonna have a bunch of affiliates crowding the MSN space. I’ve advertised with MSN for a while now and I can tell you that the volume isn’t all that…and that’s WITHOUT having a massive influx of affiliates looking for homes for their campaigns.

I’ve said this over and over again. If you want to have success slinging a rebill offer, you better get smart about promoting it.

There are legitimate ways of getting these offers not just on Yahoo and MSN, but on Google too. It just requires a little invention and the guise to see beyond the “one shot” conversion. If your marketing expertise boils down to “I bid on this term and show them this page”, you’re going to get royally raped in the next few months – many times over.

You want to know the easiest way to build a long term campaign for a rebill on the big three PPC platforms? It’s simple. You don’t put your fucking rebill on the landing page.

Squeeze pages, opt-ins…whatever you want to call them. This is what you need to be doing – and doing well – to slip through the net and stay kicking in the search game.

It’s time to start collecting emails and taking on real-life business principles.

So you’re a promoting a bizopp which is getting scrubbed out of profitability – what do you do? You retain the lead. You design a business strategy where your only hope of converting that lead isn’t a one-time exposure to a flog.

Forget about your inconsequential clickthrough rate to the offer.

The second you start focusing on collecting emails instead of redirecting clicks to an offer – your clickthrough to the offer page is going to take a nosedive. That’s just the way it is.

But put it this way. If you have 50% of your 100 visitors going through to the offer page, is that really the best you could do? That’s 50 clicks to an offer.

What about if from those 100 visitors you collect 25 emails instead?

That lead is yours. It’s not going to get scrubbed and it’s not forever lost after it decides that your flog is a misleading piece of shit.

If you work your email list right, you could get 5 future clicks to another offer from each of those 25 emails. That’s 125 clicks to an offer. Instead of 50 – from the same original source of traffic. Your chance of converting the traffic no longer hinges on whether the prospect has his credit card in his pocket.

Of course, the real benefit of squeeze pages comes from the fact that your shady rebill isn’t immediately exposed. As soon as a Google intern reviews your flog, it’s gonna get marked with a low quality score. We’re hearing the same story coming out of the Yahoo camp. If you’re not seeing your ads slapped now, that’s no reason not to act now.

Jesus, I stumbled across Wickedfire earlier and I saw a bunch of affiliates shrugging and insisting that their campaigns were still rosy. Well, good for them. But I hope for their sakes that they’re moving fast to avoid the next slap – because it will inevitably come.

Staying one step ahead is what separates the earners from the eternal broke-as-shit learners.

I’ve spoken to several guys who are still reeling from the Google crackdown. I’d say the group is pretty much divided between those who are battering Yahoo and MSN with their old campaigns, and those who are trying to move on to display ads.

If you’re moving in to display ads and media buys, you’ve got one hell of a journey ahead of you. It’s possible to lose money rapidly when you switch from CPC to CPM. You can’t rest your hopes on an awesome landing page compensating for a poor clickthrough. You need top notch creatives, probably a professional designer, and enough moolah in the kitty to see it all go to burn many times over.

I strongly suggest you dip your feet in slowly with “monthly tenancy” offers and CPC banners where you can get them. You’re also about to discover just how much shitty traffic it’s possible to buy when you step away from Google. Be prepared to lose a lot of money before you make any. Be prepared to deal with sneaky asshole webmasters who’ll pull any string to make you believe that their traffic source is more valuable than it really is.

But for those of you who want to gut it out on the big three PPC platforms – I’ll say it one more time. You better get smart about it.

Google Drops The Banhammer On Bizopp Affiliates

I’ve been getting bombarded on MSN so I thought I’d address this with a single post.

If you haven’t already heard, Google has decided to bite back against bizopp affiliates. If you’re one of the guys who received this email over the last couple of days, you’re probably too busy scratching around for new traffic sources to be reading this post. I’ll paste it for everybody else.

It’s come to our attention that you have submitted ads that promote Google Money Tree or ads that promote a misrepresented affiliation with Google. Due to multiple complaints from our users and publishers, we’ve made the decision not to accept these ads.

This is a notification that your account has been suspended due to the submission of these ads and your ads will no longer run on Google. Please note that future accounts you open will also be suspended.

As noted in our Terms and Conditions, Google reserves the right to terminate advertisements for any reason. To view our Terms and Conditions, please visit https://adwords.google.com/select/tsandcsfinder.

We appreciate your cooperation.

Google Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043

You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your AdWords product or account.

This has, quite understandably, caused a large number of Adwords-only affiliates to shit uncontrollable bricks over where the next pay cheque’s gonna come from. As I’ve said on a number of forums, you’d be a fool to believe that it’s impossible to get another account up and running on AdWords. But then, you’d be an even bigger fool to actually bother.

Time to face facts. If you’re looking to run ads that promote a Google bizopp on AdWords, you’re living on borrowed time. I’ve heard more than enough reason to believe that the hottest keywords in this niche are now auto-triggering a manual account review. When that review comes, you better have your ass wrapped up in some pretty shit hot cloaking to stand a chance of escaping the ban.

Guys, this isn’t the sort of ban that you get on a forum. You can’t just choose a new email address (and maybe a new IP), and then go re-registering. There’s much debate over how sophisticated Google is when it comes to tracking those who opt to game the system after a ban. I’ve heard opinions ranging from the quick fix of emptying cookies and using a pre-fill credit card. And at the other end of the spectrum, some think nothing less than buying a new PC, shaving your fucking head and going under the knife is going to be enough to dodge the Adwords Suspendo team.

If you’re really such a lovesick puppy dog that you can’t bare to make a dollar away from Adwords, you will definitely need to:

• Get a new credit card.
• Get a new address on the credit card.
• Find a new IP to access your Adwords account from.

Ironically enough, my Adwords account was registered to an old home address. I’ve since been given a new credit card and my new Internet was installed yesterday so I’ve automatically got a new IP. I could go and install a brand new sparkling Adwords account with no back history of bizopp abuse, but you know what? I really can’t be bothered to waste my time with them.

I’m sure many affiliates are actively hunting out new credit cards to get their Adwords accounts back up and running. But why? It really doesn’t matter if you were running a campaign that was making you a five figure sum of profit every day. If you didn’t immediately explore your traffic options after you established that profitable campaign, you’re a fucking retard and you deserve to fail.

I’ve said this to PPC guys and I’ve said it to SEO guys too. If your entire business is built around driving traffic from Google, it’s no more than a castle built on sand. Especially if you’re operating in the shady business of rebills where it’s quite obvious that changes are necessary to regulate the industry.

If you’re one of the affiliates who’s woken up to a suspended account and no other source of traffic, it’s time to consider whether you’re in this game for the short term riches or the long term success.

Adwords can be an incredibly profitable source of traffic. If you can find a way to keep campaigns ticking over by Google’s rule of thumb, you should feel entitled to enjoy those large cheques. But don’t expect anything less than a steep, harsh learning curve when Google changes it’s rulebook and leaves you staring in to the abyss.

Look at all the options available to you. Diversify your traffic, test new waters, and don’t be afraid to stop living as Google’s bitch. The same can be said for every major traffic source. Diversity and flexibility are the keys to establishing successful campaigns that last longer than it takes for an Adwords teaboy to press “Ban”.

Are You Target Number 1 For The Scrub & Shave?

If you’ve had your ears to the ground recently, you’ve probably heard quite a bit of discussion on the murky business of shaving and scrubbing. No, I’m not talking personal hygiene but rather the constant struggle for transparency between affiliates, networks and advertisers.

People will bitch and moan about these issues until they’re blue in the face. But you’ve gotta know what you’re dealing with before you throw the toys out of the pram. And most publishers refuse to see both sides of the story.

No affiliate likes being scrubbed, and no affiliate likes getting the shave-o treatment. But it happens and it’s probably happening to you right now.

Scrubbing is a widely used tactic by both networks and advertisers. You might never know that your leads are getting scrubbed until it reaches such a point that your profits are turning in to losses. On the network side, this works by simply scrubbing out some of your leads. You might be pushing through 100 leads a day, but only 95 are showing up in your stats because there’s a 5% scrub going on behind the scenes.

The network will usually only resort to scrubbing if it’s concerned that the quality of the leads you’re sending is low. I’ve heard of advertisers striking up contractual agreements that a scrub is applied across the boards to every affiliate on that network for a particular offer. This is generally a precaution taken to compensate for the poor leads that a certain set of publishers might be sending.

Zip submits and short email submits are the widely used example of a vertical which has been brought to it’s knees by excessive scrubbing. If you push a lead through which is already registered on the system, you’re going to get scrubbed. If your leads don’t meet the quality criteria that the advertiser has in place to make a tidy profit, they’ll scrub you until the margins add up.

As for shaving, this is a much darker area. Once again, it happens with both advertisers and networks. While most of us affiliates who’ve been doing this for a while have come to expect advertisers shaving leads, you can bet that there’s gonna be a backlash if it’s discovered on the network side.

Shaving is where the advertiser simply doesn’t report a certain percentage of leads. It can get even murkier when you start having networks taking a cut to go along with the shaving – and yes, ultimately it’s the affiliate who gets fucked over.

It’s long been suggested that Direct Track – one of the most popular systems used for lead tracking – has a built-in function which can automatically shave leads to a set percentage. I can’t speak on the subject for sure because I’ve never had access to the software and I’ve heard mixed reports on that being the case. Don’t be fooled though. Many advertisers will REFUSE to run an offer with a network unless there’s a percentage of leads shaved from the final payout.

More recently, some of the lesser known networks have gotten real aggressive when it comes to using the scrub and shave tactics. But they do it in such a way that you’ll barely notice a difference in your profit margins. They do it by simply offering higher payouts.

What’s the number one way to bait a fresh inexperienced affiliate? It’s probably something along the lines of “Oh hey dude, we offer the same Acai berries, but with a few extra bucks thrown on top.”

The affiliate thinks he’s getting a stellar deal and switches network. Now the network has to balance the books and actually sustain it’s own margins. So what you’ll normally see is a small but significant scrub. The affiliate won’t notice a massive change because although the conversion percentages are down, the higher payout keeps everything even. The network wins because that’s one more affiliate working for them that would have been working for somebody else.

Network issues like this are generally pretty straight forward to resolve. You should be actively split testing your offers to see how they perform when funneled by different networks. You could spend a whole year promoting Offer X and making $2.50 EPC, only to switch to a different network and see it bumped by 30 or 40 cents. Those margins add up over time.

It’s also important to network and stay in touch with affiliates who are working the same verticals. Believe me, put a bunch of guys making $xx,xxx/day in the same chat window and they’ll soon smell a rat when a network starts getting dirty.

I try to avoid the issue by only working with networks where I know the guys at the top are just as serious as the affiliates when it comes to these type of issues. I recommend Convert2Media on the simple basis that Ruck will fuck any advertiser that tries to put a foot out of line straight up it’s ass.

So what can we actually do about the bigger picture as affiliates?

Step one – look at things from the advertiser’s perspective.

This entire system is not designed to fit in with an affiliate’s ROI. We are the tiny fish in a massive pond. While it’s feasible that lawsuits could be bounced around where proof is had, you’ve gotta understand that the affiliate is much lower in the food chain than the network and the advertiser.

The only real way we can negotiate the scrub and shave is by providing what the advertiser really wants. What the advertiser is paying your ass to bring in the first place…quality leads.

You’re never going to weed out the shadiest advertisers who scrub for the sake of greed, and shave for the sake of upgrading a yacht. But in many cases, the advertisers are resorting to underhanded tactics because affiliates are providing low quality leads.

Low quality leads? How do we know what we’re sending? It’s all just sales and clicks right? No, it all goes back to the presell. How honest have you been in promoting an offer?

I was promoting an offer which was converting around 14% just a month or so ago. Without any warning, that dropped to under 5% overnight. I wasn’t the only one. Wickedfire members caught on pretty quick and it soon became apparent that one particular advertiser had decided to pull the shave-o trigger. This royally decimated the EPC’s for a lot of high flying affiliates. It happened on a reputable network so I think we can say for sure that the advertiser was acting on it’s own accord.

Of course, this just so happened to coincide with a warning that was sent out to all networks about promoting more than one offer on a page. To use the Google bizopps as an example, many affiliates decided to upsell an eBay work at home opportunity. Worse yet, some idiots decided to promote TWO Google bizopps on the same page in a way that suggested that the customer somehow needed both products to get maximum value.

Now, issuing a rebill on a Google offer is pretty unnecessary in itself. The information is all there once you make the purchase. You’re not getting anything new at the end of every month. Misleading customers in to signing up for two of the same thing…it’s kamikaze marketing if you give a shit about the quality of your leads.

Can you imagine how pissed off that customer is going to be when he discovers that he’s being charged $150 or so monthly for two products when they’re essentially the same and he’s getting nothing extra for his subscription in the first place?

Naturally, that customer is going to be on the phone canceling his order faster than you can refresh stats.

Cancellations and poor quality leads might seem pretty irrelevant to you. It doesn’t matter if a customer cancels if you get your $36, right?

That’s a completely destructive attitude to have as an affiliate. Can you blame the advertiser for wanting to shave the hair off your ass if you’re sending them leads that are not only going to cancel, but are going to be ranting expletives on the phone while they do so?

No, the advertiser is soon going to catch on. That’s exactly what happened recently when my conversions fell from 14% to 5%.

The advertiser looked over their financial sheets for the last few months and did some high school maths. They obviously decided that a little shaving was necessary to boost profit margins and that’s exactly what they did. A few affiliates taking a completely destructive approach to acquiring leads via any means necessary completed raped the rest of us out of the market.

Widespread shaving on that level is quite rare. But if you don’t want to be target number one when the advertiser points at a subid to shave in to the ground, take a little more pride and care over the leads that you’re sending. If they’re not good for the advertiser’s business, believe you me, they’re not good for YOUR business. And we’ll all feel the consequences as a result.

The Rebill, Compliance & Why You Should Care

Now is one of the hardest possible times to be getting in to affiliate marketing. I consider myself at an automatic disadvantage being relatively new to the business. Disadvantaged by joining the party when the days of being able to promote an offer aggressively are coming to an end.

I can’t stress highly enough how important it is that affiliates start paying greater attention to the pages that they’re publishing online. The industry has been allowed to get away with some outrageous liberties in the way that we promote offers. I can’t see it lasting much longer. At the heart of the CPA industry we have the rebill offer.

While the rebill offer has been around forever, it’s also true that we haven’t seen it promoted or taken to the mainstream in the same way that we do today. The reason we have jobs as affiliates pretty much comes down to the volume of leads and sales we can generate. No company’s internal marketing department can compete with the volume driven by hundreds of Internet marketers.

I don’t care what the industry says. Affiliate marketing may get a bad name, but we have some of the greatest marketers in the world operating amongst us. It’s no longer a niche industry though.

Affiliate marketing is getting more and more exposure, and with a huge rise in network sign-ups, we can expect to see more Acai offers finding their way on to the web. More Google bizopps on the Content Network. More idiots using Oprah as a marketing wheel.

The rise in exposure is going to lead to an increase in scrutiny from the FTC and government agencies. I can see some affiliates getting hit hard and hit where it hurts. The rebill is already causing a much louder chorus of complaints than it was 6 months ago.

To get things straight, I think the rebill is a totally legitimate method of running a business. There’s nothing wrong with offering a free trial to a customer and a contracted payment plan afterwards. That’s if you do it fairly and explain the terms clearly.

But of course, not many of these shady companies are actually explaining those terms. The customer is utterly blind to the payments that they’ve just committed to and the resulting complaints are quite understandable.

For this kind of marketing to work on such a scale that we’re seeing in 2009, two things need to happen.

1. The companies selling these products need to get their shit together and be more upfront about the T&Cs.

I don’t care if it decreases my EPC by a few cents, I’d rather be safe in the knowledge that the customers know what they’re getting themselves in to. Charging the ass out of a rebill is one thing, upselling a bunch of products the customer isn’t even aware of – that’s a bunch of crap. It needs to be explained.

Super small white text hidden on a grey footer of a page is not good enough. It might be now, but when the crackdown comes, these companies are going to have to offer a lot more disclosure and transparency.

2. Affiliates need to pre-sell the facts, not the fiction.

The market has become so fierce that it’s no wonder we see so many flogs popping up. They produce the greatest EPCs and the greatest conversion rates.

Again, I think the flog is a perfectly legitimate marketing method – if it sticks to the facts and steers well clear of any suggestion that the product is an amazing “freebie”.

Have you noticed how some of the hottest converting offers in CPA actually reveal very little on their merchant landing pages? We get a bunch of testimonials and a bloated promise, but not much else.

This is because the companies selling the products KNOW that they can rely on their increasingly sophisticated affiliates to pre-sell the living shit out of their products for them. Their sites often act as no more than a payment page. The responsibility is falling on the affiliate to explain what the product does, what it is, and this is dangerous. Dangerous because so very little is revealed to us in the first place.

Most of the time I have two lines of description to work with. Offer accepted in USA/CAN…converts on 2nd page, etc.

The bizopp market in particular is absolutely hideous for explaining what actually comes with a purchase. We, as affiliates, are marketing in to the unknown and that’s part of the problem with these flogs. They’re inaccurate and misleading. They shouldn’t have to be.

I’ve had to deal with customers calling me on the phone, emailing me and adding me to instant messengers. Why? Well I fucked up with one of my WHOIS records for a start. But also because my affiliate landing pages are typically where the customer has read about the offer. The affiliate is revealing more information than the merchant, and the customers are pinning the blame on us when they don’t like what they find.

The responsibility is firmly on the affiliate to presell an offer. That’s why direct linking results in a much lower conversion rate.

If we’re going to be the ones doing the main presell, we need to be even more diligent than the merchant when it comes to making sure that nobody is posting their credit card details under false pretenses.

I don’t think we need to explain the exact financial aspect of the rebill. But we DO need to mention that a rebill applies with the offer.

Affiliates are becoming so hyper-focused on making that sale, they’ll often throw the T&Cs out the window. Calling it a “no risk, free trial” might increase conversions, but it won’t sit pretty with the FTC for much longer.

I’ve become increasingly paranoid about the offers I’m promoting. I think we all have a duty to be. I find it highly unlikely that the FTC is sitting there, legs crossed, with no plan of action for dealing with the kind of misleading marketing that is sweeping the Net.

The affiliate marketing industry is simply growing too fast for this kind of negative publicity to go unaswered for much longer.

Instead of spending your time looking for the next offer, I’d suggest affiliates set aside a day and look over the offers that they’re already promoting. Ask yourself whether they would comply with the FTC regulations now, and the inevitable regulations tomorrow.

Or go one step further. Get yourself hooked up and ask that an FTC representative personally reviews your landing page before you put it online. Better to be safe than sorry.

Keep Up To Date With Affbuzz

If you haven’t already heard, it’s now possible to stay up to date with all the significant affiliate marketing blogs through one handy aggregator tool…

Say hello to Affbuzz.

I’ve been meaning to drop a line about this site for a while. It’s an excellent homepage for anybody who’s looking to stay on top of the industry. If you want to know what’s going on, get on Affbuzz and read up. There’s a whole lot of significant insignificance for you to get your teeth in to.

How does Cakes get center fold by default? What a bitch.

As for actual updates – I’ve got a couple of posts lined up to go out this week.

To Flog Or Not To Flog

It’s rare to read a blog that’s actually informative in this age of rehashed dribble and top ten lists. So props to Jay Weintraub for posting an excellent summary of the notorious flog. This guy knows his stuff.

Anyway, the flog. The fake blog. The “How I Lost 50 lbs Using XXX & Made a Website So You Could Read About It” method of promotion. It’s been around for a while and you’ve probably seen various adaptions of it.

I’ve often said that creating a convincing testimonial is one of the very best ways of persuading somebody to buy a product. Creating a fictional story of success is a brilliant catch to the reader and it’s a proven performer in the market – whether it clashes with your advertising principles or not.

Recently my attention’s been drawn to a number of sketchy lawsuits and legal complaints. First we had the threat of legal action against a bunch of fake acai blogs, and then we had the Texas GA taking non too kindly to a Google offer (which was pretty much a scam by the sounds of it). I’m so confident as to say that jack shit will happen to the affiliates who were involved in these altercations, but that’s not to say that we shouldn’t start thinking about the way that we’re presenting our offers.

I think a lot of the criticism directed at flogs is justified. From a purely moral perspective, it’s hard not to feel just a little bit scummy about endorsing a product that’s as likely to result in miracle weight loss as a Shoemoney breakfast.

I think the key to the continued success of the flog is to treat it as a product recommendation rather than a product testimonial. And of course, to flood that shit in disclaimers.

If you create a fictional story explaining how Mr. X lost XXX lbs using Product X, you’re positioning yourself as a lame duck for the day that the FTC decides to clamp down on false advertising. You’re misleading people. Plain and simple.

If, however, you write a blog by Mr. X, who lost XXX lbs, and wants to help others do the same, AND happens to have heard good things about Product X – it’s a recommendation rather than a testimonial. No worse than any of the thousands of fake review sites out there, and no worse than an infomercial on Channel 5 at 6am.

For a dieting flog, you can still have your personal success story of how Mr. X lost XXX lbs with a bunch of supplements he ordered online. Well, he doesn’t know if that offer is still around anymore but he’s heard that THIS one is even better…

Now, there’s still a degree of lying involved. But fundamentally, you haven’t directly implied that you have any experience of the product that the customer is going to be buying. There’s a fictional story attached, but it’s far too flimsy for serious legal action to be taken. What are they going to pin it on? The fact that you didn’t use to be a fatty?

Hey, if you’re absolutely determined to stay within the letter of the law. Go out and find a former fatty, get them to put their name to your blog, and go nuts.

As with most forms of marketing, there’ll always be some idiots who abuse the system. You’ll get people who don’t stop at false advertising. They’ll steal your berries from you, and your colon kit too.

Since I took up affiliate marketing full-time, I’ve become extremely cautious of the pages I’m sending traffic to. If I’m going to be making five figures from a fake blog, I want to be extra careful that I’m keeping it on the right side of the law. That means I’ve started crafting my sites in a way that they’re persuasive without ever falsely promoting a product. Still full of bullshit, yes. But the beach whale who stocked up on acai pills because of my site can’t come back to me and ask why her bacon drapes are still in tact. It was her choice to start popping them.

I think a lot of guys out there are simply misinformed. Can you really blame so many affiliates from publishing such misleading flogs, when the number one piece of advice for new affiliates is to “go look at existing sites”?

That’s exactly what I did when I started. I saw a bunch of flogs and started marketing aggressively in the same way.

Even when I talk to my affiliate managers, they regularly tell me that Offer XXXX would work great with a flog or a fake newspaper page. I’m actively encouraged to go out and build these things – and I invariably do. The flog is one of the best converting methods of promoting an offer. It doesn’t have to be a breach of advertising standards if you get your shit together and think about what you’re putting online.

Truth be told, whether it belongs here or not, the flog is going to be a prominent part of online marketing for a long time to come. As long as people are stupid enough to believe whatever they read.

Google Money Tree Gets Rooted Out Of Texas

So you’ve heard the news? Google Money Tree – one of 2008′s most popular Biz-Opp offers – has hit the headlines under a barrage of threats from the Texas Attorney General.

It turns out the popular get-rich-quick Google scheme is what we knew it was all along…a waste of money. The sort of offer you’d have to be blind, deaf, dumb and plain stupid to sign up to. No offence, Mum.

Not only have the Google Money Tree founders misled their customers with purposefully hidden small print, but they’ve also failed to actually send the damn kit to some of them. Now it turns out that Attorney Greg Abbott is baying for blood, and it might just be YOUR Adwords campaign he’s ready to pounce on.

Have a read over the public press statement below.

Infusion Media Inc.’s ‘GoogleMoneyTree’ uses high profile name to deceive out-of-work Internet users

AUSTIN – Attorney General Greg Abbott today charged two Utah-based defendants with operating a fraudulent work-at-home scheme. The state’s enforcement action names Infusion Media Inc. and Jonathan D. Eborn, whose “GoogleMoneyTree.com” promised six-figure earnings for conducting specialized Google and Yahoo Internet searches.

According to investigators, the defendants promised big payouts in order to convince Web users to spend $3.88 on shipping and handling for a “free kit” that supposedly would show them how to make money from home. Those who purchased the kit were later surprised to discover they were being charged $72 a month by the defendants.

Internet users encountered the defendants’ Google and Facebook advertisements, which linked to blogs that were created to promote their work-at-home offer. The blogs included “testimonials” that touted their products and led viewers to believe that previously unemployed users were earning high salaries conducting Internet searches. According to the blogs, interested parties need only acquire a “free kit,” which was available through GoogleMoneyTree’s “sign-up” page.

Individuals who requested the kit were required to provide substantial personal information, including their name, address, telephone number, email address, and credit card payment information, which was supposed to be used to pay the $3.88 “shipping and handling” fee. Customers believed they were only obligated to pay the “refundable” processing fee and were not aware there would be additional charges to their credit cards.

According to the state’s enforcement action, GoogleMoneyTree failed to clearly inform purchasers that they had been enrolled in monthly memberships and had only seven days to cancel their trial membership. Purchasers who failed to cancel within seven days were automatically charged $72 on their credit card statements each month. In addition to the unexpected credit card charges, customer complaints obtained by state investigators indicate that GoogleMoneyTree failed to actually send the “free kit” and refused to honor customer refunds.

The state is seeking an injunction, civil penalties of up to $20,000 per violation of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, as well as restitution for purchasers. Texans who believe they have been misled by similar business practices may file complaints with the Office of the Attorney General toll-free at (800) 252-8011 or file complaints online at www.texasattorneygeneral.gov.

So what does this mean for rebill Biz-opps? Not a fucking lot, I’d imagine. The affiliates will blame the networks (promoting what’s in front of us). The networks will blame the merchants (not our fault it’s a scam). The merchant will blame the retarded customers for not reading the small print. Expect a rumbling of industry conversation while various affiliates with highly perched morals withdraw their rebill offers for fear of a lawsuit landing on their doorstep.

I expect this to last all of about ten minutes before people accept that the rebill offer is as old as marketing and a perfectly valid selling mechanism.

If anything, the injunction will serve to frighten a few affiliates out of the market and make it a more lucrative place to be for the rest of us.

I was a fan of the Google Money Tree offer while it lasted. It wasn’t my most profitable Google campaign but it still converted at around 11% and made me a couple of hundred dollars a day.

There will be those who take the moral ground and insist that it’s about time these shady rebill offers were stamped out.

Personally, I think they can go fuck themselves. If the terms are stated clearly, and if the merchant delivers what it says it’s going to deliver – that’s fair game in my eyes. Burden be on the naive retard who actually expects popping a few Acai Berry pills to save his waistband.

I don’t have a personal attachment to anything that I sell. When you’re in affiliate marketing, your customers are as faceless as your employers. There’ll always be another Google Money Tree lurking in the campaign listings. But are you going to order a trial copy of every last product you promote? I didn’t think so.

Promising customers the chance to earn money from home is no shadier than telling some 40 year old virgin that he can get laid tonight on such-and-such dot com. Marketing thrives on the best case scenario, not the reality of the situation.

As for affiliates getting legally challenged for unknowingly promoting the scam offer – give me a fucking break. I’m tempted to go set up an ultra targeted Adwords campaign selling the Google Money Tree to only Texas just to cream a deserted market.

Absolutely nothing will come of these baseless threats. The affiliate is safe. Those Money Tree founders might have some explaining to do though…

UPDATE: To clarify, because I’m sick of hearing about it! Yes, I did advertise Google Money Tree money at one point. I pulled the offer as soon as I found out the owners weren’t delivering the actual product and had been avoiding customer complaints. I don’t like being associated with scam products any more than the next guy. Any affiliate who continued to advertise GMT after it was revealed how they weren’t even delivering a product, should take a step back and re-evaluate what he wants to get out of this business.

We all know these are cheap shitty rebills that aren’t gonna make you rich overnight. We don’t know that they’re scams though. That’s a completely different ball game. There are lines to be drawn and if you’re worried about promoting a product that happens to be a scam, get in touch with your affiliate manager first. They will usually have a good idea of how reputable it is.

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