This outstanding guest editorial is from Ben Moskel. In December I spoke at Ben’s Affiliate Marketing Seminar in Chicago. He sent me an outstanding rebuttal to last week’s “Death of Affiliate Marketing” teleconference. Here’s Ben…
Last week Perry Marshall hosted a teleconference with Super-Affiliate Amit Mehta. Perry and Amit discussed how Google recently banned dozens of affiliate marketers from using Adwords.
Perry titled the call: The Death of Affiliate Marketing on Google and you can find the corresponding blog post here.
Amit stated that in some industries the number of advertisers has been slashed from 50 to 5 as the result of the Adwords bans.
There were other comments made that gave me the impression that Google is or will be banning any and all affiliate marketers from using its advertising service.
Frankly, I think it’s a bit premature to think that Google’s goal is to rid the World of Affiliate Marketers. My observations indicate that Affiliate Marketing still continues to thrive on Google.
I do know several advertisers who are now banned for life. However, all of the objective evidence indicates that Google is targeting a very narrow category of advertisers – not just people who are doing Affiliate Marketing.
Specifically, all the banned advertisers who I know personally had one thing in common:
They promoted (or were suspected of promoting) a business opportunity (biz-opp) product. Even more specifically, they promoted a biz-opp product which used Google’s brand in the product name, e.g. Google Money Tree, Google Profits, Google PayDay, etc.
Google Money Tree could be especially problematic and perhaps the catalyst of the recent activity. A close friend of mine was banned by Google because he used “Google Money Tree” as a keyword.
His training material had nothing to do with Google Money Tree. However, he could not convince Google of his innocence. In other words, a single offensive keyword led to his demise!
Most affiliates were banned for promoting biz-opp deals which used the Google brand name
Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the owners of Google Money Tree were sued just a few months before Google went on its Adwords ban rampage?
My legal background reminds me of the mindset of plaintiff’s lawyers. When I worked as an attorney in a civil litigation law firm I quickly learned that plaintiff’s lawyers always look for the deepest pockets.
In other words, if there is any way to name the deep pocket as a defendant, a plaintiff’s lawyer will figure it out. If I am the plaintiff’s lawyer for the consumers who were wronged by the Google Money Tree product, and I know that they used Adwords as a vehicle to promote the product, then I’m going to do all I can to get the $153 Billion Dollar Gorilla on the other side of the table.
As a lawyer advising your client, the primarily mindset is cover-your-ass. I would be shocked if Google’s attorneys didn’t warn the Adwords department of a potential messy lawsuit if they continued to allow advertisers to promote Google type biz opp products.
I’m aware of other non-affiliate advertisers who were banned too. I can only guess that they were unfortunately caught in a wide over-zealous net to catch the real targets.
(This all goes without mentioning how Google probably does not want their brand equity to be used to promote a hyped up biz-opp program).
Otherwise, my own experience as well as conversations with affiliates and account managers tells me that Google still is happy to accept money from Affiliate Marketers in most industries outside of the business opportunity space.
You can see this for yourself. Do a search for just about any product outside of the business opportunity/work from home market and add the word “reviews”. You will see that Google is often selling most of this space to affiliate marketers.
For instance, take a look at “web hosting reviews.” Five of the top six spots are affiliates.
Google still sells space to affiliates in other markets
This isn’t to say that you need a product review website to use Adwords. It is just one of the many obvious examples where Affiliates continue to thrive with Adwords.
In fact, Google is actively building its own Affiliate Network – recruiting super-affiliates and new advertisers. (And no, all of this is not part of a big conspiracy to monopolize the Affiliate World.)
The bottom line is that it’s a little premature to announce of “Death” of Affiliate Marketing on Google because a narrow slice of affiliates are no longer allowed to use Adwords to promote business opportunity products.
I believe that people are quick to over generalize Affiliate Marketing and throw Affiliates into the same bucket with shoddy products and price gouging continuity programs.
In fact, I was at a marketing conference a few weeks back when a very well known Internet Marketer walked up to me and said that he would never do Affiliate Marketing because his conscience would not allow him to fool consumers into singing up for a crappy weight loss continuity program.
I wasn’t sure whether to be more shocked or angry at his ignorance.
Being an Affiliate isn’t about fooling consumers into signing up for the latest “flavor of the month” continuity product.
Put simply, Affiliate Marketing is selling without the face-to-face aspect of sales.
Remember too that Affiliates were originally called Publishers because they had already published tons of content on a topic before they became affiliates. In other words, there are many affiliates who own websites containing a mountain of content on a particular topic. These affiliates also use Adwords.
What reason would Google have in banning such websites from using Adwords?
On that same topic, there are literally thousands of legitimate well-established bricks and mortar businesses with robust affiliate programs. Dozens of affiliates make damn good livings selling reputable products and services.
Here are just a few examples of products I’ve promoted as an Affiliate:
- Zappos Shoes
- Turbo Tax
- Web hosting
- Norton Anti-virus
- 123 Inkjets
- Travelocity
- Automobile parts
- Lawn and Garden products
- Weight Watchers
- Pet prescriptions and pet products
- Sporting goods and equipment
- Rosetta stone language learning
The list goes on and on and there are thousands more offers just like them.
Indeed, the Affiliate industry is very much alive and well on Google.
With that said, I did agree with Perry and Amit on how affiliates need to provide content in order to survive. I didn’t recall that any concrete examples on how to add value as an affiliate. So I decided to list the two most effective approaches that work for my affiliate sites:
- Product Review/Testimonial – what I mean here is a real testimonial. My best advice to new affiliates is to USE a product or service before you promote it.In fact, most of the products I promote I have bought for myself, my relatives, and my closest friends. I use their feedback in my sales message.As a consumer you get the inside perspective of how a product works, the sales process, etc. In other words, you get the exact EXPERIENCE that your website visitors are looking for. Plus, you will notice the downsides of the product or service which are actually a great addition to your sales copy.For instance, if I were to promote the Kindle as an affiliate I would write about how the battery life stinks if you accidentally leave the wifi enabled.These sorts of things give your sales letter authenticity and creates a stronger sales message to a potential buyer.
- Use the “Super-Sub-Niche Angle” – You’ll discover that many products and services solve a host of totally different problems. You can really differentiate yourself by segmenting your sales message and tailoring your sales page entirely towards just one of the problems.Let’s take the Weight Watchers example. Everybody knows that Weight Watchers is for people looking to lose weight. How about if you design your affiliate website around one of the many REASONS a person is trying to lose weight like:- They want to look good for an upcoming high school reunion
– They want to get in shape for an upcoming beach vacation
– They are recently divorced/separated and need to make themselves “marketable” for the dating sceneI guarantee that if you dedicate your website to one of these super-sub-niche categories, your visitors will be 100% more satisfied than if they went directly to the Weight Watchers website.
These are just a couple of ways to be an Affiliate who adds value.
In other words, this is a way to find your USP as an Affiliate Marketer.
In closing, I totally disagree with anybody who claims that Affiliate Marketing is now “dead” on Google or any other online advertising platform. My experience has proven just the opposite.
However, I do appreciate anyone who warns me against getting comfortable with relying upon any single advertising medium as a reliable traffic source. I believe you should constantly test out alternative traffic methods as well as alternative affiliate offers. (I’ve had $50K per year affiliate offers die overnight!)
The days of easy profits from affiliate offers are long gone. The only security in this business is to hone your craft and get really, really good at copywriting, buying traffic, negotiation/joint venturing, and any other direct marketing skill.
Ben Moskel
Ben Moskel is a former attorney and professional practitioner and teacher of affiliate marketing. He lives in New York.
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47 Comments on “Ben Moskel: The Rebirth of Affiliate Marketing?”
Ethics! both from the government side and from the business side. I had one single use of adwords but stopped it and now trying to do without it.
My affiliate marketing is just starting up and I shall keep it clean. Well, principles do count. over regulation is not a good solution either.
I enjoy looking at other websites that have important tips and information about affiliate and CPA marketing. You have a site that should be bookmarked by anyone wanting good starting tips for beginners and even information for those more seasoned.
The big G has got to big they seem to control everything maybe it’s time the gov step in and slap them.
Google has paid almost a billion dollars in fines for the sins of its advertisers. Government over-intervention is a huge source of this problem. Actually the reason G slaps businesses is, if the businesses get out of line, the GOVERNMENT slaps Google. Seriously. So every advertiser is now guilty until proven innocent and advertisers are extremely restricted in what they can say and it hugely hampers small businesses. We need less government not more.
Will Ben Moskel go to jail ? Perry, please update !
So far as I know, Ben Moskel is fine.
2 years after his guest post, Ben’s business has been shut down by the FTC:
http://ftc.gov/opa/2012/11/lostopp.shtm
Here’s the discussion on the Warrior Forum:
http://www.warriorforum.com/main-internet-marketing-discussion-forum/712744-new-ftc-enforcement-ponder-learn.html
Very nice post : Affiliate marketing is a very important part of internet marketing. Today Internet marketing has become part and the parcel of every business and no one can deny the importance of this new era and good Articles like this are adding a lot in the importance of internet marketing.
I have found out the hard way about pleasing the Bots for PPC. Some of the content has to be in image format because the bots are not intelligent enough to know what the site is really about. They make calculated guesses and that can put your site into Slap’s ville even when it does not deserve it. The PPC World is evolving and staying on top of all the requirements is almost a full time job.
My account has been ‘under review’, ‘suspended’, ‘complained’ and whatnot according to G. The funny thing is, the websites of merchants of the products I WAS promoting had at least a PR of 4 and were highly ranked for some very popular keywords.
They were legitimate products which I have had not one single refund of, and they certainly do not contain any taboo words like ‘Google’ or ‘Cash’.
I think a big part of what determines if your account is legal(according to the Big G’s law) or not depends greatly on luck and the employee who is reviewing your campaigns.
My account is currently under suspension (again) and I wonder if miracles will happen like the previous times?
One question here – Can I track sales conversion using php on Yahoo and Bing if the buy page is on the merchants’ websites and not mine? Do they have a ‘destination url’ and ‘display url’ like adwords?
What I’m getting from this article plus the comments here is that no-one really has a clue what the regulations are re: AdWords and affiliate sites….
Which seems a poor reflection on google more than anything else.
Well said. I agree. No one outside of Google seems to know all of the parameters involved here. And I’m sure this is often the case within Google.
Here is an interesting post from someone who had their account banned for doing SEO research via AdWords:
http://www.dotcult.com/adwords-account-banned-for-keyword-research
Linking to other sites to test keywords is an interesting and effective practice for testing, but even here one needs to be careful. We have to remember that Google’s human editorial review department is watching things more closely these days. It’s not about trying to get past some bot or algorithm, as many affiliates have tried to do in the past.
And who knows if this will improve anytime soon. The fact that Google’s phone support will now often send you back to their website for AdWords help and then automatically hang up (which they did not do in the past) is not very encouraging.
Great post. I agree that affiliate marketing is not dead for I have had some success in the past few months. I am still new and learned a lot from this post.
I liked the points you made about finding sub-niches as well as a USP. That will definitely help.
I agree that the only way to make it is to buckle down and get good at copywriting, knowing your visitors, and adding value. And if you can afford to buy traffic, you have to get good at that too.
All in all, thanks for the insight Perry.
Anthony
If you are going to have affiliate links from CPA networks on your site you have to use a redirect file. This is probably a short term fix. Affiliate marketing will never die on Google, but advertising fly by night scams will always have a short lifespan.
Sadly enough there will always be these kinds of offers with people who know the laws well enough so they can “break” them—like deadbeat renters who know every renter/tenant law. Even affiliate managers from very reputable networks tell their affiliate to get in and get out in order to “strike while the iron is hot.”
But again, affiliate marketing will never die. It is all about value, and creating communities.
Great post Perry and Ben. I had one of my AdWords accounts banned recently, which was used for testing various CPA offers. I used this account for educational purposes for training various AdWordAccelerator customers who do affiliate marketing with my software.
However, I never promoted any Google type of products and was pretty selective in terms of what I promoted. I think there are still some unknowns in this area. Some have suggested that email/zip submit offers have also caused bans. (I didn’t promote these either).
This post reminds me of Scott Boulch’s report years back, “The Death of AdSense”, which was released after Google implemented their smart pricing algorithm. This change definitely thinned the AdSense herd, slashing the number of MFA’s, but people are still making money from AdSense in legitimate ways. And I believe smart affiliate marketers will continue to thrive in Google.
Hi Ben,
“(And no, all of this is not part of a big conspiracy to monopolize the Affiliate World.)”
Do you know that for sure?
What is your source?
All the moves Google is doing indicate that they are going to be the biggest player in the Affiliate world,
I trully believe they are going to rule the.
You see,
They have all the information (keywords, ads, statistics, etc) to run the best campaigns, they learnt us for years,
This up coming decade will go to social media with twitter and facebook,
Google sees that and they are almost ready to double its income from the affiliate world.
Well no I don’t know that for sure, but I suspect that Google is not trying to monopolize the affiliate industry.
Here are a few reasons why I feel that way:
1. Google banned very few affiliates in comparison to the entire pool of affiliate marketers out there.
Google continues to allow most affiliates access to Adwords even if those affiliates promote offers via other networks.
2. After acquiring Performics Google has not made any significant moves to acquire other affiliate networks.
There are literally hundreds of affiliate networks which operate totally independent of Google. If Google was trying to monopolize the affiliate industry I would expect a move towards acquiring other networks because, by doing so, they would simultaneously acquire the advertisers, affiliates, and relationships between them.
Admittedly Google is continuously adding new advertisers. However, they predominantly operate in the retail vertical and apparently seem content to operate without going to far outside that particular vertical.
3. Finally, I recall when Google launched conversion optimizer and lots of people in the industry declared the end of affiliate marketing.
I don’t know if conversion optimizer made even a ripple for affiliates. Personally, for our company, it has only helped us spend less money on our affiliate campaigns.
One last thing to note is that there are some relationships that are seemingly immune from Google’s grip. For instance, consider the example that Perry provided involving the local business who is not doing any search marketing. In my experience, those types of clients are easy to please and there is less noise than with national cpa/affiliate offers.
Thanks Perry
Times are indeed a little rocky online. This morning I read how VISA was starting to ban setting up merchant account for $1 free trials and free CD/DVD offers that have continuity components tied to the trial or freebie.
Thanks
Jonathan
I was making a few hundred a month as an affiliate for gambling products until google changed the rules, so stopped using adwords. 6 months later I get a phone call from google ” Why am I no longer using adwords?” when I gave them a honest but unPC answer my account was shut down the next day. At no time had I used the word google in any ad or product.
I’m happy that the guys behind money tree got sued as they ripped me off enough times.
Amit was right – affiliate marketing is dead. You all should quit now & pull your ads ;)
Thanks to Perry and Ben
I’m about to learn adwords and it’s really helpful for the information provided in this blog.
A true review of a product is very important for a customer. So, I think google is trying to help her customers to get the correct website when customers are searching for certain product. Or else, no one will like to use google search engine again.
Elvin
I have to congratulate Google for doing “something” about the Affiliates issue, probably in part of a response from the FTC, who was getting hammered with on-line related complaints.
No, Ben, Google is not trying to rid the world of Affiliate Marketers, they just happen to be the biggest – as a group – offenders.
I think the Biz Op affiliates marketing field has become a “me too” product dump, with small innovations spurring huge new product launches. It’s become kind of an oligopoly of the top 20 to 30 marketers who cross breed sales till they have become in-bred.
I only wish Google would seek to do more to monitor other categories as well.
Howie Jacobson and I had what started off as a 15 minute chat about AdWords account banning last Wednesday, which turned into a 57 minute tele-seminar.
He’d found my article “Google AdWords Account Suspended – Is this the end of Direct Linking?” written last december
As Ben rightly asserts, the affiliate marketing business model cannot be totally dead.
There’s too much money in it, and too many huge players — the burgeoning Google affiliate network included.
However the “delivery mechanism” whereby affiliates promote merchant offers is definitely becoming de facto much more strictly
regulated.
For example, As I mention in my article, last April Amazon.com in North America closed down one aspect of its affiliate marketing network with very short notice — that of direct linking.
And there are clearly very good reasons why they would do this, including poor conversion rates, channel conflict, and cost of their resources.
I only heard Perry’s call with Amit after my own with Howie, and it’s interesting how we independently reach some of the same
conclusions — namely that of the value-add.
Although Google is quite overdue in taking strong action against some organisations which are clearly violating their brand, that time has now arrived with the involvement of the FTC. Now they’re taking no prisoners.
And I believe that Google has a wider Agenda that it’s conveniently able to use to broaden the “collateral damage” inflicted by the likes of googlemoneytree and other such egregious (to use their own term) types of marketing (the dictionary defines this as meaning “offensive”).
It’s been reported to me that new affiliates simply opening a direct linking campaign for amazon products in the uk are immediately detected and shut down.
Why should this be?
I am TOTALLY pleased with this post. Nothing like balance. I am Sooo glad I studied copy-writing.
As to the comment about testimonials with regard to the FTC… as someone with a weight loss product (original content – real-easy-weight-loss.org) the FTC is very clear about how you can use testimonials, but I will ALWAYS use them when ever I have them, because they ARE POWERFUL.
Posts such as these prove once again that the knowledge PM shares are cutting-edge. You get the good, the bad, and the ugly – along with intelligent rebuttals like this – which you can use to *hopefully* draw a fair and balanced conclusion for yourself.
Although Mr. Moskel opines that the basic premise of the previous post in question is “premature”; I think it’s fair to say that it can all be boiled down to conflicting information from different authorities… mixed well together with a huge portion of Google’s lack of transparency.
Bottom line is that we’re left to figure out things by ourselves – more based on what Google does; not necessarily what they say. As such, one may not always hit the “Google attitude towards affiliate beacon” dead center.
Nonetheless, it’s nice to have folks like PM and Mr. Moskel on the forefront and who are also willing to share their knowledge with fellow marketers.
As a super affiliate, I’ve known hundreds of people who have been banned from Google. Many of these people were banned because (like you said) the google biz ops, Acai weight loss, and other scammy rebill products.
Some legit affiliate did get caught up in all of this and unfortunately were banned as a result.
Affiliate marketing still works on Google, just takes a bit more work now.
Hi,
Great post. Of course when the public out cry becomes loud enough about a particular product. Google like any company will do whatever they need to do in order to protect their brand.
Thanks for the insights Ben and Perry.
As Dan Kennedy says, the worst number in any business is one – having only one main product, dealing with one big customer, focusing on one advertising medium, etc. At some stage, it’s bound to end in tears…
I have in the past made the mistake of letting one of my affiliate products combined with Google advertising become responsible for 50% of my income, only to see the product manufacturer ban advertising on two main keywords that were responsible for 90% of my sales. Talk about a bad morning…
The result was that sales dropped to virtually zero overnight, and I had to scramble to replace that income (funny how lifestyle expenses rarely drop to compensate for a sudden loss of income).
I have since been granted an exception to advertise using these two Trademarked terms, but it certainly reminded me of what Dan said all those years ago.
Thanks again for sharing this lively debate.
Cheers
Rocky
Thanks Ben. I will sleep better now that you have explained more in detail. Does this mean Perry’s own “definitive Guide to Google Adwords” affiliate program is in trouble?
Paul
Thanks Ben for this excellent post…It will make me sleep better tonight. BTW does this mean Perry’s own “Definitive guide to Google Adwords” affiliate program might be in trouble?
Paul
I was also banned and never promoted any kind of money making schemes. I never ran an offer that had anything to do with Google or Google Cash or anything like that.
When I contacted Google AdWords team to find out why I was banned the answer I basically got is this:
“Your websites primary source of income is through affiliate marketing sales. We do not allow that.”
and then they pointed me towards their general and difficult to understand terms and conditions that are so ambiguous 99% of the advertisers I see on AdWords could potentially get banned according to them.
I mean, what kind of website DOESN’T make some kind of income as an affiliate?
Their terms are totally bogus. They basically gave themselves a blanket statement in their terms which puts 99% of all people in the wrong and then they can just slap/ban accounts based on whatever criteria they want with no recourse.
I’m really surprised someone hasn’t taken them to court over this yet.
That was a great post and I wanted to say thanks for posting it. This whole theme is great from my perspective. It just make it less competitive for legitimate online marketers.
Greg Writer
Expert Marketer!
Great perspective from Ben Moskel. After listening to the call with Amit I did agree with most of the discussion and also thought that perhaps he did not have a big enough pool of marketers to talk to. Because although many affiliates where banned not all were. Many of my peer where banned and I was not. I stopped doing what I had been told and stood back a realized that the problem was that the site did not original content from me. I have now built 2 sites that only original content. Affiliate marketing is alive as long as original content that comes from your experience with the products being marketed. Thank you Ben for your response and thank you Perry for making it more widely available.
I was banned and I never promoted a get money site, a rich quick scheme, or anything to do with Google. The basic premise of this article is just wrong
Jonathan,
I’m sorry to hear that Google banned your account.
I assume that you are also using Yahoo! and Bing to run similar campaigns that were banned by GOogle?
Yahoo is especially good traffic and is a great place for affiliates. The rules are SO much more relaxed, there are no Yahoo slaps, and they’ll even give you an human account rep without a large budget.
Plus, lately Yahoo has improved the advertiser’s experience in my opinion.
Specifically, your ads will go live almost immediately and they now have a desktop editor which I believe is still in Beta. Finally, you can now track conversions on Yahoo’s partner and content network which you couldn’t do previously.
If you are not advertising in Yahoo and Bing, here are two ways to quickly replicate a Google campaign for Yahoo! and Bing. (this should take no more than 30 minutes).
Here is how I do this:
You will EXPORT an Adwords campaign using Adwords Editor. You then UPLOAD the exported campaign to your Yahoo and Bing accounts.
Here are the basic steps:
1. Open Adwords Editor (you should still be able to access your campaign data even if you were banned)
2. Select “FILE” ==> “EXPORT SPREADSHEET”
3. Save the file to your computer.
4. Open your Yahoo ppc account
5. Click on “CAMPAIGNS”
6. Click on “IMPORT”
7. Select the tab that says “Convert Third Party Campaigns”
8. Upload the Adwords campaign file.
As a caveat, you may encounter a few errors when you upload the file. The first time I uploaded my files I have a few glitches in the way that the spreadsheets were formatted.
However, I called them and a guy from Yahoo fixed the problems for me and got the campaign live.
I hope this helps.
This article reflects what I thought when I read your death article Perry, but with much more depth. Thank you Ben. Classic Perry with an attention grabbing headline! Nice link baiting btw :) I appreciate Ben’s insights as his post is well written and he obviously has much more experience most.
Thanks Perry and Ben for that information.
Being from “old school” networking I stayed with that direction but have brought it online as “new school” as per Mike Dillard philosophies but had planned on maybe getting into affiliate marketing.
I do sell Dillard’s products in my blogs along with a couple of others such as BlogSuccess where I am a member for learning purposes also.
I’m not sure if that is considered affiliate marketing that you guys speak of even though I am an affiliate of both those cocepts.
Maybe someone can clear that up for me.
That is affiliate marketing.
I believe Google is not out to kill the affiliates, since this is part of their bread and butter. Google is doing this to weed out the scammers so that people will continue using them as their choice of search engine.
I guess that Google wants quality advertisers and not quantity, they are taking a long term approach.
On that being said, everyone who use free or paid medium should be smart enough to know that they should put an opt-in form on their landing page to collect their own database of qualified leads who are ready to buy products that can help them to solve a problem.
If you have a huge list of qualified prospects, you really dont need to depend on search engines for a living.
Thanks Perry, you always have the most up to date information, I am not experienced like you so I always find your posts very helpful. Very powerful post by the way, thanks again
Yuriy
Very interesting post.
Is Google cracking down on misleading posts or just ones that seem to take their name in vain?
Very well written, Ben. It seems that Google is trying to cull the herd, get rid of the snake oil salesmen and allow those who are promoting a viable product or service to prosper.
Our industry took a major hit this year too, as Google banned an entire set of keywords that pointed to a cheap product that didn’t work for enough people that I’m sure there were many complaints. Overnight, an entire industry of affiliates promoting that product were banned. The author of the original book (Water4gas)went from $50,000 a month in sales to zero. Google would warn us every time we even tried to use that term or group of keywords in our advertising, (and not approve the ad), so we had to walk very gingerly with our campaigns (still do to this day).
We started out with a “How To” book as well. But I personally built and tested the product I wrote about, I knew it worked. But I quickly surmised that for everyone who wanted to build their own generator to increase gas mileage, there were probably a hundred who would rather buy a ready made kit. And I was right.
Our focus shifted to developing real, solid, pre-manufactured kits, and it has developed into a fast growing industry, especially with our new line of Hybrid Cells.
Is it harder than just selling an info product? You bet! Managing cash flow, inventory, shipping, etc can be taxing, but I have a viable business with opportunities and offers coming in every day now.
When our affiliates sell, they sell a hard product, and Google doesn’t seem to mind that at all.
What many of you may run into now is what we have had to deal with this last year; the clarion call of critics, naysayers and finger-pointers calling you out as a scammer, or a even an outright liar. Loud, boisterous people who read an article or two about why Google banned this thing or that, and have now taken it up as their mission field to hunt and destroy anything which might be even remotely related to that banned industry.
Your best bet as affiliates is to take up a cause, product, or service, that you yourself are willing to fight for and even use. If you are embarrassed by what you promote, you may want to think twice…Google may go after them next.
Lastly, If I were Google, and people were using my name in a promotional product or advertising without my permission, I’d shut them down too. Especially if they were offering a somewhat shady product.
Bob
There’s a problem with your examples. Namely, the FTC. You need to caution people to use things like testimonials “this did X for me” and claims like “fit into your old prom dress” very carefully. I see these tactics being replaced by product demonstrations.
If you look closer at the accounts that Google is banning are also violating FTC laws which is why they are being targeted.
But I agree to your point of diversifying. I’ve had large campaigns evaporate overnight as well. That’s a bad morning.
Smart marketers will find ways to create communities around product categories. I believe that you need to own your media, as opposed to renting someone else’s (ads). Ads are a great way to get started, but long term you want to be a destination monetized by affiliate offers (as well as other revenue sources)
This is a scary post. I didn’t know about the recent Google move. I have been promoting Google Terminator quite unaware of the fact that Google might not like it. Mind you, I cannot afford Google Adwords at this stage of my education. The guy who produced the product taught me from scratch how to set up a WordPress blog, basic SEO tactics, how to write content etc. I consider it a beneficial product for any newbie to affiliate marketing and it definitely contributes positively to the world of internet marketing.
Must I scratch my reviews and all reference to the product name from my site to protect it? What is your advice to a newbie like me?
I do get the point that we must contribute value but contributing value and using the word “Google” are not necessarily mutually exclusive. I hope that Google will realise that not every mention of its name is taking that name in vain.
I agree with you about contributing value and using “Google” not being mutually exclusive. In other words, I agree that there probably are some good products which do use “Google” in the product name.
In my post I didn’t mean to imply that all “Google” products do not provide good content. I was simply relating what I learned from our experience and specifically that Google Adwords actually explicitly told my colleague that he was banned for promoting “Google Money Tree.”
The allegations against Google Money Tree were/are that they failed to provide the proper disclaimers, did not allow customers to (easily) cancel their continuity program, etc. If you take a look at that complaint the allegations indicate that the Google Money Tree product was fairly obnoxious when it came to customer service, etc.
Ultimately the District Court enjoined (stopped) Google Money Tree from using its (Google) name.
Also, take a look at this recent lawsuit in the Utah district courts where Google is suing another company for using its brand.
http://www.google.com/googleblogs/pdfs/pwwcomplaint_120809_ogb.pdf
If you read the complaint you will see that Google references the Google Money Tree suit as case precedent to support the claim.
You may also notice that lawyers for Google indicate that consumers were complaining to Google about the fees and charges associated with the products so clearly the customers were confused about whether Google endorsed these products.
The problem is not that affiliates are promoting hypey products. The problem is Google is not being clear on its policy. Thats what I think.
This is a good post Perry, bookmarked it and even post it on my blog here.
http://affiliateredemption.com/death-of-affiliate-marketing-on-adwords/
The commentary you provided from Ben Moskel is highly educational and most appreciated. Last week I listened to the teleconference between Amit Mehta and you, and was very concerned with his “death of affiliate marketing” statement. Mr. Moskel’s view at least provides a different understanding and suggestions on retaining viability as a successful affiliate marketer. Am certain some innocents, including Amit, have been caught up in the recent “big ban”; my own view is these people should be given another chance.