UPDATE: Make sure you read Aaron Wall’s comment below.
I usually read SEO ad PPC blogs via my feed reader, so I don’t see much of their on page advertising. Yet, yesterday I went directly on a couple of online marketing blogs and I was surprised to see that one of the bloggers I follow was running a display ad for SEO Book with an affiliate url. Why was it a surprise ? Because Aaron Wall wrote down at the end of August that he was not accepting any new paying members in his SEO community.
I looked around for SEO Book affiliates and easily found bloggers still promoting SEO Book via its affiliate program.
Let’s see how the SEO Book Affiliate program works:
“Pay-Per-Sale $25.00 USD for each sale you deliver.”
(Source http://www.seobook.com/rf/)
So if you are an affiliate and you promote SEO Book, you need to generate a sale in order to get paid. As no one can become a premium member, it is impossible to generate a sale, so what you are doing is giving free advertising to SEO Book without realizing it.
SEO Book affiliate banners and links bring traffic to the site, expose the brand and we can assume that they also indirectly support Aaron Wall consultancy work.
What do the affiliates get in return ?
… Nada.
As I appreciate and respect Aaron Wall, I decided to join the affiliate program and see if there was a warning message about this issue during the sign up process or in the affiliate dashboard. But no, nothing of the sort.
I got an email saying that I could start “earning money today”, which obviously was a lie. And I was told that the default landing page for a SEO Book affiliate campaign was this one: http://www.seobook.com/join/
Again, you’ll find no mention on the page that the site doesn’t accept new paid members.
So is SEO Book scamming its affiliates ?
1.) I already emailed all of our existing affiliates about this a few weeks (or maybe a month) ago. Feel free to ask around about that. A few of them even bitched me out for the email not being CAN spam compliant when I was trying to offer helpful advice. Some people are just assholes.
2.) We will likely be open in the next 2 to 3 weeks.
3.) I increased the cookie length to 180 days and credit the 1st affiliate with the sale. So even if we are closed now you can still get credit if you refer people who make sales.
4.) The email wasn’t sent out as a lie (just as our autoresponder series still promotes joining the site, which is currently closed). When I closed it I didn’t ask myself all the different ways it affected the site as I was close to burn out and just needed to cut back. But as you can see from #1 AND #3 above I did try to do my best to treat affiliates as fair as I could.
Some people do not appreciate that when an individual has 1,000 customers and runs a number of websites that sometimes they miss stuff. And I don’t want to start tuning the site down away from as is because that is just going to be that much more I need to change before I open up again.
Did anyone ever make any money with this kind of affiliate program?
Actually, yes I did, Singapore SEO.