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Tale of the Affiliate Done Wrong

October 20, 2009 by Shawn Collins

There was a post on Search Engine Journal a few months back, No Precedence For Social Media – Amazon Hangs Us Out To Dry, that railed at Amazon.com’s affiliate program, because “Amazon.com refused to pay any commission on a link that I distributed through Twitter and Facebook.”

affiliate-done-wrongThere was a lot of buzz about the issue, so I figured I’d use the Amazon.com Associates Central Contact Form to ask about promoting affiliate links on sites I didn’t own and included my Twitter name:

I understand that you prohibit including affiliate links in Twitter, since an account there is not owned by the affiliate.

Just wondering if you can clarify where the line in the sand is drawn – if I have a blog on WordPress or Tumblr, where it’s my site, but on their servers as a subdomain, is that my site?

I got back the following reply the same day:

I have reviewed the Twitter site and approved its addition to your Associates account. Links established through this URL to Amazon.com will qualify for referral fees. We ask that you add this URL to your account online. Please follow these steps after logging into http://associates.amazon.com.

  1. Click on “Account Settings” in the upper right-hand corner of the main page.
  2. On the following page, choose “Edit your Web site information.”
  3. In the description field titled, “Briefly describe your web site” in the center of the page, add the new URL(s). Be careful not replace your existing URL displayed in the box titled, what is the URL of the main web site.
  4. Click on the “Save Changes” button at the bottom of the page to save your changes.

If you would like to add your WordPress page or Tumblr, you will need to provide us with the URL so we can review the sites and okay their addition as well.

That is certainly reasonable to me. Affiliates should list all URL’s they will be using to promote an affiliate program, so the affiliate manager can review them.

Anyhow, I’d forgotten about all of this until an email came in today in response to getting a rejection email for the Affiliate Summit affiliate program.

That is fine, I really did not care for the attitude anyway ! This is good example of stupidity ! You have no idea what web site I going to promote it on, what blogs I may have, what social sites or forums I have a following on, so how do you know if I am suited to your snooty program ??

Exactly. We had no idea about this affiliate’s relevant sites, because they were not in their profile. There were a handful of other sites and descriptions listed, all of which were for a vertical that has absolutely nothing to do with our affiliate program.

Moral of the story… if you’d like to participate in the “snooty program” for Affiliate Summit, please include your sites in your profile.

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Filed Under: Affiliate Tips

Shawn includes advertising links in some posts - these do not influence the content, and they promote products and services he uses.

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