Affiliates That Don’t Get Fined Do This

One of the biggest secrets to successful affiliate campaigns is creating killer “angles” to pitch from. A great angle is what separates the pros from the joes. A great angle turns crap campaigns into $1k a day money makers.

Creating an angle isn’t as hard as you might think either. It’s simple really. All you need to do is understand your niches needs and wants and their demographics. From here you can cultivate an angle that resonates with them.

For example – the team over at iPyxel recently posted a case study. It’s a beautiful example of what was just said above.

While the younger demographic may not be considered as valuable to certain advertisers, they are highly receptive to a myriad of messages and tend to click a lot.

The key goal then is to harness their impulsive tendencies with a more substantive message. With that, I began to think about the various circles by which young people identify themselves and a major group was the “Gamer” crowd.
source

It’s a pretty incredible case study. They shared (with screenshots) just about every part of their campaign from the targeting, to the ads, to the landing page, to the analytics. It’s a great read.

So what does this all have to do with being fined as an affiliate?

Well, the devil is in the details.

You’ve got to be absolutely sure that when you decide on an angle to pitch from – it isn’t one that the FTC is going to shut you down for. Yes that means you need to do your due dilligence and know how you can and cannot promote certain offers.

This was brought to my attention after someone had read one of my niche reports for www.ovallstars.com. In these niche reports I present a niche with sample keywords, offers, creatives, blogs, forums, and example pitch angles.

In my eCig report I had written out some pitch angles that you might want to examine as an affiliate. One of those angles was the “quite smoking” angle.

When you research eCigs, you’ll see that a lot of people want to use them for just that purpose.

A savvy OVA member private messaged me about this very report. As it turns out that angle is one that can get you into some seriously hot water with the FTC.

He told me:

The FTC is the ultimate gatekeeper for online offers. If the offer involves anything a person puts in their mouth or on their skin, then the FDA is involved.

Both websites for these organizations outline very clearly what can and what cannot be done in the way of marketing offers.

You must also use common sense. If an offer seems to good to be true, it is.

If an offer seems shady, then it probably is.

Probably the best way to do any research on a particular niche is to google “Marketing restrictions for marketing X” and see what comes up, or Google “FTC guidelines on marketing X”, or similar.

In addition, there are a couple of law sites that may have good information for marketers:

http://www.fdalawblog.net
http://ftcbeat.com

TID Bytes Internet Law Blog

2013 Internet Law Syllabus and Casebook Now Online

http://www.lawyermarketing.com/resources/internet-marketing-news/

Now don’t get me wrong here. This guy isn’t a lawyer, I’m not a lawyer, and this isn’t legal advice. This is simply words of wisdom based on previous experience.

With that said though – you’ve got to know what you’re dealing with as an affiliate. Be professional. Do the work and spend some time research legalities of the angles you want to test. It’s the difference between the affiliates that stay out of trouble and those that find themselves on the wrong side.