Be Careful about What You Promote Online
If you have around on the Web for a while, you have probably heard that you should be very careful about what you put online. It’s not just about your Facebook status or your Twitter updates. It’s about your pages and every piece of content that you produce for others to read. In this day and age, you can be sued for anything. That includes linking to a P2P site or promoting an affiliate product that might contain some gray hat tactics. You may find it hard to believe, but you can get in a whole lot of trouble for promoting a product like that.You can not only get sued, but you can lose your site in the process.
A while ago, I decided to promote one of the best affiliate marketing products on ClickBank. I took time to test the product, and I was very impressed with the depth of knowledge that the product producer was sharing in his package. There were a whole lot of videos on cool tactics that you can use to drive lots of traffic to a website, so overall it was an excellent product to promote to the affiliate marketing community. Little did I know that some of those small little tactics had irked one of the major affiliate networks on the planet. You can probably guess what happened next. I was contacted by the company, and they pretty much told me that they will send a seize and desist letter unless I voluntarily take the story down. Since I did not want to open the Pandora’s box, I decided to cut my losses and promote another product. But I am sure those guys would’ve followed through with their threats had I not taken the story down.
The tactic that was dubious was using job boards to make money from affiliate marketing. That affiliate network did not want any part of that, so that’s why they were going after all the affiliates who were promoting that product. You may think it’d be better to go after the source and ask them to remove the objectionable content, so it was surprisingly for me to be contacted by a lawyer directly. This practice is very common in the affiliate marketing community. Credit card companies won’t hesitate to take your site down if they don’t like what you are promoting on it. In fact, some of them will sue you if you write a bad review about the product, and there is really nothing you can do about it unless you want to get into a nasty fight.
It’s always better to promote a product that does not come with a baggage. Some people like dealing with lawsuits, and they may even use them to gain more publicity. It really depends on how strong your business is and what your plan is exactly. For the rest of us, it’s always better to cut your losses and move on. Remember, you want to make money online not waste time.
Your thoughts: have you had a similar experience promoting products online? Please share.
