Yesterday, the Federal Trade Commission issued revised guidelines that advise bloggers who make money from endorsements to clearly disclose their relationships with advertisers.

The main thrust of the 81-page document, “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising” occurs in a statement on page 75, which reads:

When there exists a connection between the endorser and the seller of the advertised product that might materially affect the weight or credibility of the endorsement (i.e., the connection is not reasonably expected by the audience), such connection must be fully disclosed.

Unfortunately, the guidelines, which go into effect December 1, have no teeth.

• There are no rules specifying how disclosures must be made, other than that they should be clearly visible.
• Furthermore, there are no penalties for violating the guidelines.
• Monitoring will be reactive rather than pre-emptive with investigations occuring only after a number of complaints have been made about a certain blog.

As such, scammers will continue to make false and misleading claims and those who don’t grasp the concept of ‘caveat emptor’ will continue to waste their money.

My recommendation – Be a Super Affiliate blogger. Post your disclosure statements. Make sure your visitors understand the difference between editorial, advertorial, and advertising on your site – not only for their protection, but also to enhance your credibility as a reliable source of information.

Build trust – build your customer base – increase your sales.

Here’s an email that I received today (pertaining to http://netprofitstoday.com/go/sah2) that is proof positive that you shouldn’t outsource placements of your ads on other websites to an advertising agency that promises a “significant return on investment to the exact requirements of our clients” or that they “know what kind of promotion is going to add to the bottom line“.

Hi,

I work for (name removed), a leading broker of online advertising, dealing with many thousands of independent webmasters worldwide. We currently have a client in the Financial Comparison industry for whom we are looking to acquire advertising from quality websites.

We’ve had a look at Superaffiliatehandbook.com and think that it would be a good match for our client, whose target demographic is similar to your own.

We would be interested in purchasing advertising in the form of a text-based link on your site. To reduce unnecessary admin and hassle, we prefer to pay a fixed annual upfront fee for such advertisements. Once the ad has been placed, payment can be made quickly by PayPal or an alternative method if you choose.

If you are interested, please get back to me with your rates etc. I look forward to hearing from you.

Kind regards,

(name removed)
(site removed)

The guy couldn’t have looked at the site, or if he did, he knows nothing about the industry.

The Super Affiliate Handbook has nothing to do with ‘financial comparison’ and more importantly, there’s NO advertising on the site because it is a one-page sales site.

Really, really obvious stuff that any industry pro would have noticed. More shocking still is the fact that the advertising agency that he works for has an affiliate program. Looks like he would have been farther ahead if he’d bought the book and learned something about the industry instead of trying to sell advertising.

Man, I love this.

John Reese (Traffic Secrets) just sent his affiliates an email with the subject line “WARNING: Some TS Affiliates Are About To Be Terminated” which starts off by saying that “there’s a really good chance that this email will not apply to you. It’s only aimed at a small number of people“. The message then goes on to say in part…

It’s completely against the TOS for our Affiliate Program to use *misleading* advertising of any kind.

Well, there are several of our affiliates currently using misleading advertising — especially with Google AdWords.

Anyone that’s using ‘controversial’ and/or misleading headlines or ads will be immediately terminated from the affiliate program if they don’t stop running these ads right away.

Stuff like, “John Reese Ripped Me Off” or “Traffic Secrets Lies” etc. etc. Then of course the ad simply redirects to someone’s affiliate link or a review page with their affiliate link.

Are you running misleading, negative ads like this? If you are, you have only a matter of hours to kill all of these ads or you will be terminated from the affiliate program.

We are working very hard to maintain the INTEGRITY of our business and we’re not about to condone this type of misleading marketing.

WAY TO GO, JOHN!!!

In all the years that I’ve been an affiliate marketer, and for all the rubbish, b.s. and bogus advertising that I’ve seen – particularly within the Internet marketing niche – I’ve never seen a manager or product merchant come down so hard or so quick to curb those affiliates who use these misleading tactics.

Now, I bet you can guess who is going to change her own affiliate agreement post-haste.