I got an email from CJ today. They wanted me to describe my promotion methods and put my payments on hold. I was pretty upset since I have done a huge amount of work. So I took an other good look at the TOS and realized that I had mistakenly violated one. I had seen on many forums that people had affiliate links in their signatures. So thinking I was smart I started to post my links in my sigs in various forums on topic of my niche. Well turns out that is against TOS unless you have permission from the site owner to do so. So, now I am waiting to hear back from them. I am kind of sick about it since I had worked really hard on this and was about to get $1600 from them. Not bad for my first 2 months with CJ I thought. I emailed them and told them that I had removed all the links. I also pointed out that I had not posted links for all affiliates on 3rd party sites only some. Hoping to save a percentage of my money. It really is mine, I worked my ass off for it. I hope they don't take all my commissions. Anyone have experience with this? What can I expect? will they just boot me and say "too bad sucker" ? or are the decent to deal with?
Because they don't want publishers spamming. At most, I'd say that they would just deduct earnings from the links that they think were placed without the owner of the websites consent.
Thanks all who replied. I have not heard from them yet. I hope they don't get too heavy handed with my for an honest mistake.
Perhaps you should have used one of your sites as a redirect, that way it would have looked like the sale came from a valid page.
Yeah, I am sure there are ways around it. I am not wanting to do anything underhanded. However I thought that manually promoting affiliate offers to buying customers, no matter where they were, would be a good thing. I should have read the TOS a little more carefully. I guess I assumed that if you're given permission to post links on a site, IE signatures, blog comments etc... then you can post an affiliate link. In either case, I came clean with CJ. Told them the whole truth. I have not heard from them in over 24 hours and I'm getting a little anxious. I was just about to launch a new campaign of Custom Ebay/bans type stores. (not bans something I had coded myself). I had put several hours into and I am ready to launch, now I have to wait to make sure I can still promote ebay. The waiting really sucks. In the meantime my sites are making very little money cause I stopped all my PPC and promotion stuff. I'm not going to throw good money after bad. I need an answer before I can continue. I'm in affiliate marketer limbo...
I was going to sign up for CJ this week, and you're telling me you can't put the name of your site in a forum signature?
They require that if you place links to whatever program that you're using on another site, you must have permission from the site owner.
That's correct. I had been placing a link to my affiliate link management script which technically is a link to my site but directs to an affiliate offer. The anchor text for the link was the name of the advertiser. So as far as I was concerned the user knew where they wanted to go. I just made sure that they used my link to get there. It's been quite a while now, and I have not heard back from CJ. I think I am just going to keep on earning as best I can without the TOS violation.