All posts tagged affiliate marketing

Consumer Responsibility: Where Does It End?

By | February 27, 2010 | Life, Marketing | No comments
Consumer Responsibility

After writing my post on the image of affiliate marketers becoming tainted to the general public I wanted to touch on consumer responsibility. A large majority of the “non-legitimate” affiliates chalk up the misleading rebills to consumer responsibility.

If you’ve ever seen the acai berry landing pages you know how they’re structured – something similar to “Just Pay Shipping”, “Free Trial”, “Get it For $1″, etc. In general, nowhere in plain sight does it tell you that you’re being enrolled in an $89.99 (give or take) per month program that is virtually impossible to terminate without canceling your credit card.

The typical retort from acai berry affiliates is that it’s the consumers responsibility. That means it’s your job to find the tiny link on the bottom of the site and read through the terms of service where it quickly glazes over the forced continuity you’re blindly signing up for. That is a beyond idiotic argument to make and not a realistic demand.

Just imagine if everything in life was structured that way where this scenario is entirely possible:

You buy a box of cereal and are secretly enrolled in an $80 a month program for that same box of cereal every month. After being billed $80 for a box of cereal the following month and trying not to murder someone you decide to call customer service to cancel. The phone rings for hours with no answer and you realize the situation quickly becomes hopeless. You then cancel your credit card because no box cereal is worth $80 (unless it’s Lucky Charms).

I don’t think any society can function in a world like this. Consumer responsibility only goes so far, there are things that consumers need to do to protect themselves and then there are things that are completely unreasonable to expect of people.

The Tainted Image of Being an Affiliate Marketer

By | February 26, 2010 | Marketing | No comments
Affiliate Marketing

Being an affiliate is getting an increasingly bad wrap from the general public. Mainstream media has had a rising interest in the acai berry industry the last few months. I recently saw an hour long segment on a local news station talking about the acai berry “scam” and it amazed me at how misinformed they were about it. (let alone the fact they’re over a year late.) They talked about the nightmare rebill system very commonly found on acai berry websites and the extremely poor consumer ratings.

So what does this have to do with affiliates? They’re on the front line when it comes to blame and lashback moreso than the actual publishers. There are a huge amount of affiliates that are doing borderline unethical/illegal things to make quick cash. This isn’t a “one bad apple spoils the bunch” scenario either; there are thousands of affiliates promoting questionable offers and creating this scammer image. The title of “affiliate” is quickly becoming as mistrusted as used car salesman.

The reason this is happening is simply greed. There was a hole in the system for protecting consumers online by misleading them and it was heavily taken advantage of. Now that firm action has been taken by the FTC most of these affiliates are both whining and struggling to keep their income at the same level.

This is always going to happen with these types of offers which is why long term legitimate campaigns > short term questionable offer.

With all that said, there are plenty of affiliates out there playing by the rules and not exploiting the system that have the ultimate “I told you so” on the others. Props to all of my legitimate affiliate brothers, keep doing what you’re doing and you won’t have a problem making it.