Oct

Rogue Affiliate’s SPAM - a Cautionary Tale of Pc-Cillin Blocking My Site

Filed Under (Email List Building, Relationship Marketing) by Traffic Guru on 19-10-2009

This is a cautionary tale about e-mail blocking and a false positive which caused pc-cillin blocking my site (Chris’s home affiliate site in this case).

About three weeks ago I did an affiliate promotion for a product to help your social media efforts…particularly to get you better search rankings from your social media efforts.

It was with Chris Lang who I first got in contact with back in July and had good success using his product. I’ve since had over 36 hours of phone conversations with him brainstorming and testing certain tactics. He’s a good guy and does what he says he’ll do.

As fortune would have it in July he was just getting his affiliate program set up with John Delavara’s JV manager script. The script was of course particularly built to manage all the tracking and affiliate stuff so your affiliates get credit and you can easily pay them.

Unfortunately, affiliates are a wildcard.

Affiliate programs are great both for you and for your affiliates.

The problem comes when you bring on affiliates. You can get a certain rogue element which will use spam techniques and hurt your business, your domain, and your reputation.

Unfortunately, the Internet still has a lot of wild wild West feel to it. There are the spammers and there are those policing elements who want to stop the spammers.

You can think of it as a Galactic Internet battle between good and evil.

Most of the time though the evildoers have the upper hand because they are constantly developing new techniques and the policing elements can only react to those new techniques and deal with them as they crop up.

So the good guys are always in chase mode.

One of the biggest Internet security programs right now according to CNet is Trend Micro. You may even have this operating on your system and believe it to be protecting you from bad things like phishing schemes and other malicious acts.

But the software is not perfect and can get false positives.

My friend Chris’s site was caught up in a false positive through no fault of his own and has since been cleared by the company trend micro itself. His domain and e-mails are no longer being blocked and have been removed from the bad database.

Unfortunately by his own calculation of abandoned orders he has lost over $5,000 due to this error. From my own affiliate promotions I lost between $500-$1000 in abandoned orders.

But this is not a tale of woe it’s a cautionary tale meant so you could learn from these mistakes without having to make them yourself and of course not having to lose over five grand yourself.

What I’ve learned and my recommendation to you is when you’re starting an affiliate program buy a new domain which can be related to your other domain but doesn’t have to be. If you’re really paranoid buy an unrelated domain so no link can be drawn between the two.

It’s well worth the $9.29.

For example if your main site is healthtips.com which is over a year or two old, has lots of links, has some authority in the search engines, and has other brand reputation in the market you’ll want to keep that sacred.

You don’t want some rogue affiliate being able to screw up all your hard work.

So when you start your affiliate program you can buy a domain like healthandwellnessguru.com or even a domain like betterlivingtoday.com which obviously doesn’t even have the term health in it.

Because this domain is just going to be used for your affiliate program you don’t have to worry about the branding of it as much and you definitely don’t have to worry about any kind of search rankings for it because that’s not the goal.

Another key lesson is always track down problems promptly. Chris was told about a potential problem and sent a screen shot but didn’t think it was serious.

To hear the full story in Chris’s own words and avoid this tale of woe find out how pc-cillin blocking my site.

When it comes time for me to set up an affiliate program with my business I’ll definitely be using a separate domain and recommend you do the same.

You just never know when one of your affiliates will go rogue attempting to make a quick buck and post a lot of blog comment spam causing your domain to be flagged in WordPress spam filters.

Or send out a bunch of illegitimate e-mail spam and get your domain blacklisted in all the various e-mail databases and then your Yahoo, Gmail, and Hotmail users won’t get any of your e-mails.

When someone brings a potential problem to your attention about one of these security software’s definitely investigate and get it cleared ASAP.

Until next time take proactive steps to grow your business and do everything you can to prevent problems before they happen.

One more thing, do you have any cautionary tales about lessons you’ve learned? What are they? I’ll be interested to hear and respond to your comments below.

Originally posted 2008-10-29 05:13:32. Republished by Old Post Promoter

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