Affiliate Marketing 101: How To Distinguish A Joint Venture Upsell Swindle
Article by Adrienne Collier
The United States Federal Trade Commission has commenced a crackdown of dishonest online affiliate upselling.
There’s nothing improper about upselling if you do it appropriately. “You want fries with that?” is the classic upselling line. It’s honest because when you purchase a burger, there’s nothing abnormal about ordering fries, too. If you meant to purchase fries, you say “Yes,” if you didn’t, you say, “No, thank you.” Everybody wins: you get what your ordered, and the burger seller has gotten maximum value out of you.
Drop by Amazon.com, and you’ll learn how respectable upselling operates on the Web. Just about any product you order is assisted by the suggestion of purchasing a supplementary product. You buy a Kindle, you’re asked to consider a Kindle case. You order a guitar, you see a guitar case. That’s okay, too, because it’s only logical that you will also need to order an item in which to store or transport what your Kindle or guitar.
This is the way online upselling is turned into a detriment, where the seller comes across as fraudulent and the customer feel scammed. It usually starts when a vendor whose e-mail list you’re subscribed to writes that a fellow seller is debuting a brand new product that you can buy for an extra big “insider” price cut.
You go to the other merchant’s Web site, click the link to get the product, and find yourself on a different Web page selling an additional product for a very large amount. Without this other product, what you’ve just bought turns out to be functionally useless. And its very likely that whoever sent you the e-mail either got paid by other merchant for doing so, or is acting as the other seller’s affiliate and getting a percentage of the resulting sales!
That is why the Federal Trade Commission intervened. And that’s why they went directly to the top — to Clickbank, the Web’s prime digital affiliate marketer. In force August 31, 2011, Clickbank will have new regulations for all vendor sales pages:
- All scripts of videos must be sent to Clickbank for pre-approval, include disclaimers if actors are utilized, and must incorporate a mechanism for stopping or pausing the clip. – Signup deadlines must now be uploaded to Clickbank for verification.- The number of upsells will be limited to only three, and cannot be mandatory to make the product originally ordered work as advertised.
If you’re an up-and-coming online marketer who wants to understand how to avoid rip-off upsellers, you should start at the top yourself: there’s only one way to begin if you’re interested in learning respectable online marketing. Since 2005, Wealthy Affiliate.com has taught thousands how to earn money with respectable Web-based marketing methods. WA charges a low monthly tuition, but not for their free MAD Marketing Method basic online course, which you can get from http://bit.ly/qWUo8T .
About the Author
The Wealthy Affiliate free MAD Marketing Method shows you the basics of how to earn money online not only with Clickbank, but also with search engines, keywords, social marketing, and your own Web sites. You can sign up and start immediately. And did we mention that the course is free?
