I have a sort of niche product blog, and I just got approved from one of the companies I applied to in CJ. I was wondering if I could take a picture from their website(either host one of their product pictures on my server, or just "copy image location"), and make the picture clickable with my affiliate link, so that if visitors liked the product they could just click the pic and be taken straight to the company's store. Is this against most terms of service? Obviously it varies between companies, but if I did this would it probably be okay? I'm just not a fan of putting text ads or banners... My site is in my sig if you want to know what I mean. Each post has a pic, and I want to make that pic clickable with my affilitate link.
have you contacted the site about it yet? they can probably give you a better answer than anyone here, since it is their image
It depends on the advertiser. For most of them, I'd just go ahead and do it. 99% of advertisers won't care, as long as you're driving traffic and sales to their site. And of the 1% who DO care, they'll probably email you a warning anyway. Some of them are idiots though (SONY I'm talking to YOU!), and have such ridiculous restrictions that it's easier to drop them completely.
Firstly, Kerosene, I must have repped you for something recently, so I can't do it again, but I would give you big rep for your sig! Probably one of the most tempting, clickable sigs around, though I couldn't say why! Secondly I would echo this - if you use the CJ feed/API to get products from various advertisers, you get "fed", among other things: 1) image link, 2) product link. So what are you supposed to do with those, other than link to the advertiser product?! Like Kerosene says, do they even care, as long as you are sending sales and not using any dodgy tricks - especially if the link is valid? Then again, I have never heard of what you say about Sony either, so anything's possible...