Follow the Terms of Your Affiliate Offers or Else

I’ve been affiliate marketing for nearly a year now, and I’ve gone a long way. I’ve learned much, but I know I still have a lot left to learn. The waves of affiliate marketing are always shifting, especially recently with the FTC on the move wanting to possibly punish some affiliates, and even credit card companies starting to block charges from many of the rebill offers available through affiliate marketing channels.

One thing that can help you stay ahead of the game though is to make sure you are following the guidelines set down by your affiliate networks and the offer owners. Many times they will do this on the network page saying you can and can’t market here, you can and can’t market to certain people, and you need to have this on your page, but you can’t have that on your page. Sometimes, you’ll have to visit the offer page and click on an affiliate’s link to check out the terms needed to market the offer.

No matter what, make sure you comply 100%. You might be able to bank a bit more if you trim some corners here and there and just pretend you didn’t read the rules, but what happens once you spend $10,000 to advertise it and then the offer owners or network won’t pay you out because you weren’t 100% legit? No one wins, and you might be kicked off that network for generating false leads or sales.

This actually happened to me once. I was too stupid to even realize there were rules to the offer. It was a $4 lead generation offer for the dating site eHarmony. I had had success with other dating offers, so I decided to just run it the same as always like how I had the others. I took some nice cleavage pics, some recycled ad texts, and put them up on Facebook. As soon as I had all this running, I was doing some crazy EPCs and ROI. I think it was around 300%.

After a few days of this and me just blowing the campaign up, spending more and more on it, I get an email from my Affiliate Manager telling me to stop promoting the offer as eHarmony has blacklisted me. Apparently, in the fine print, I could only use ad creatives previously approved by eHarmony themselves. Dumb me, but there was nothing I could do about it. Luckily, the network gave me benefit of the doubt and didn’t kick me off.

I ended up down and out about 2-3k dollars from promoting that, and I wasn’t going to get that back. I learned my lesson, and now I always double check if there are any rules I’ve missed or some disclaimer I have to add to my landing page. Be sure you do the same so you aren’t screwed out of thousands like me.