Going to the Mat

September/October 2006 Issue: Page 102

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 Don't take matters lying down or you may get walked on.

In the last two issues of Revenue magazine I've written about mistakes that affiliates make, highlighting common errors that most affiliates commit at some point in their affiliate marketing ventures as well as detailing my own outrageous faux pas. Turnabout is fair play, so in this issue we'll look at an example of how affiliate managers prove that they too are only human.

Before I begin however, I must say that I have a lot of respect for most of the affiliate managers with whom I work. Theirs is an unenviable position. They're doing a j-o-b for a network or independent merchant and must deal with entrepreneurs, many of whom do not understand the industry. More difficult still, many managers have the added responsibility of policing their programs and trying to ferret out those affiliates who violate terms of agreement and incur needless costs by using underhanded methods of traffic and lead generation.

All too often managers are trying to communicate with affiliates who, after years of doing a lucrative business on the Net without the requirement to carry or ship inventory, process orders or administer customer service, may be a tad lazy. Speaking from experience, many of us in that situation join programs, put up links and then go on vacation, making us almost impossible to contact through ordinary channels.

But here's a tip for managers who want to get their affiliates' attention in a hurry. Send an email with "Link Expiration" in the subject line, such as the one I received recently from Cheryl Averill, the affiliate manager at CardOffers.com.

The body of the message read as follows: "A representative from XYZ Bank has notified us that your account has been participating in email marketing campaigns known as Spam. Due to this, the card issuer has asked that you be excluded from marketing their products. We have expired your links for the XYZ Bank cards today. They have asked me to let you know that they have put your site on a 'blacklist' so that you cannot get their links from another source."

Now, if you read the issue of Revenue in which I detail my foibles in the financial services sector, you know that I have little or no interest in my credit card site which is, and always has been, a waste of time from an earnings standpoint.

Regardless, when falsely accused of sending Spam – with a capital 'S' no less – I'll stand by and up for my site and marketing methods until the issue is completely resolved. The last thing any affiliate wants or needs is to have his or her reputation as an honest broker ruined for lack of proper investigation.

To this end, I emailed Cheryl to say that in eight years as an affiliate, I've never spammed anyone and demanded that XYZ Bank provide proof of their allegations, which of course I knew they wouldn't be able to supply.

To her credit, Cheryl has always been one of the most responsive affiliate managers with whom I've dealt, and is one of the few who makes the effort to get to know even her least-productive affiliates, a.k.a. yours truly. She quickly replied that she "did find it very strange that you would have come up in that list." Also to her credit, she didn't simply accept my "I don't spam" explanation but chose to investigate the situation further by asking if I sent out "an opt-in newsletter or anything of the like that they may have confused with Spam?"

Although I had been quite peeved at being falsely accused of spam and moreover, having my "hammock time" disturbed, I did appreciate the suggestion that it was her client that was "confused."

I explained that although there is an opt-in form on the site and a series of eight messages programmed into the autoresponder, that broadcast messages are rarely, if ever, sent to that list.

Cheryl then went to bat for me and said she would try to obtain proof from her client, prior to expiring my links. I found their response very interesting indeed.

Apparently, according to XYZ Bank, my site was "engaging in very active comment spam," which is just one of many types of spam that warrant termination from their program. Cheryl then asked me, "Do you even have a comment area on that site? I can't find it."

Cheryl couldn't find a comment area because no blog exists on my credit card site. Further correspondence with XYZ Bank would therefore be required to find out exactly on which site they found the offensive spam comments.

XYZ's answer was that the comment spam was located on my "personal blog." For some reason, however, they neglected to provide Cheryl with either screenshots or a URL for the site – in other words, PROOF.

Considering that I don't write a "personal blog" and run only three commercial blogs, each of which is moderated and spam-controlled to the nth degree, I still wasn't satisfied with XYZ's lack of appropriate response to this very serious allegation.

Neither was Cheryl. In a later email chat she informed me, "Due to these issues we are now going to have to modify our T&C [terms and conditions] and send out a notice to all partners about it." She went on to say, "I feel bad for affiliates … there are so many rules. Don't bid on these terms, don't bid more than this much, etc. They are being resourceful and using other methods of getting traffic to their links and now those are getting shut down."

There's another good hint for affiliate managers. Show empathy for our increasingly difficult plight and we'll be more responsive to your emails and requests – perhaps even forever grateful.

Judging by her next correspondence, I suspect that Cheryl was now becoming as frustrated as I was by the inconvenience of this needless accusation, and probably just wanted to wrap things up.

"Here is the final word. We do not have to expire your links. Yesterday it was explained to me that partner links would have to be shut off if those links were posted in a blog. Today when I told them that another partner produced 717 sales for XYZ Bank from their blog page and it didn't seem like good business sense to cut them off, they said that people could post them in THEIR OWN blog, but not in OTHER people's blogs.

"After they clarified that for me, I asked them if I would have to expire your links since you posted them in your own blog. They said no I didn't, which brings me to the question that I will most likely never get the answer to ... Why did they even bring this up if you were not posting in someone else's blog?"

Yikes! But I DIDN'T post anything to my blog, and I thought the issue was about an unmoderated blog with comment spam!

Oh well, occasionally you just have to let some things go. Especially when your affiliate manager wraps up her assessment with the best solution possible.

"I have told them, the next time there is a problem, we would like to have proof such as links where the violation was found and/or screenshots," Cheryl explains.

Eureka! Just as I'd requested right from my first reply to the false accusation, the burden of proof rests with those making the allegation. Fortunately for Cheryl, unlike other affiliates who might have ditched the program, I'm not so overworked as not to have time for affiliate managers with whom I have a good working relationship, and was therefore willing to see this issue to the (almost) bitter end.

More to her credit, Cheryl ended with "Sorry for all the stress this has caused."

Actually, I wasn't stressed at all. I was out lounging by my pool, soaking up a few rays, while responding to all those emails, so no harm done, other than a few finger cramps induced by more typing than usual.

ROSALIND GARDNERis a super-affiliate who's been in the business since 1998. She's also the author of The Super Affiliate Handbook: How I Made $436,797 in One Year Selling Other People's Stuff Online. Her best-selling book is available on Amazon and www.SuperAffiliateHandbook. com.

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