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Affiliates Banking Hard With Native Ads and Advertorials - Did You Say #$%@ the FTC?

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joeybabbs

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There is a ton of criticism directed at advertorials and promotional blogs and it is justified.

Most of them use false advertising, fake endorsements and fake testimonials.

Now, there may still be a degree of “greyness” involved when creating a compliant story that is designed to promote a product. But it seems the majority of affiliate landing pages are created by people who have never used or even tried the product. Does that make it wrong or right?

What are Native Ads?

Native advertising is a very high-quality, highly engaging digital
advertising format that enables an advertiser to promote content to a user within the context, style and function of the online experience.

True brilliance comes in creating a story of success and distributing it through major traffic sources using similar styles as the content the user is already engaged in! This has been a
proven performer in the market – whether it clashes with your advertising principles or not.

Many advertisers and affiliates use advertorial or promotional blogs. These are some of the best methods for promoting offers, all you need to do is use common sense and think before publishing something online.

Let’s be honest…whether you like it or not…promotional blogs are always going to be a prominent piece of online advertising, and if done compliantly, people will visit them long into the future, and continue to break out their credit cards to buy the products being promoted.

Truth be told…less and less people will just break out their credit card as soon as they click on a banner ad…and direct linking to affiliate products is not working. You need to do some creative persuasion on your own presell landing pages before sending them to the offer!

You can buy native ads from places like Taboola.com, Outbrain.com, Revcontent.com.

Common Affiliate Products Seen Using Advertorials


Business opportunities, diet, muscle, e-cigs, green coffee, skin, male enhancement or any other trial or CPS offer

Best Practices for Advertorials

You need to get in the mindset of the customer and solve their problems. You need to envision yourself as having the same problem, and get into the mind of the end consumer!

Think about your target market. Your target is could be someone who is overweight, or a heavy smoker, someone who wants to know if their next door neighbor is a criminal, or someone who is insecure. Those are just examples.

The trick with the majority of these high paying CPA offers is that the customers convert LIKE CRAZY when they can see success stories from others.

For example, this can be a specific story of how Johnny quit smoking using the E-cig, or how Sally discovered on Instant Checkmate that her kids weren’t safe in her neighborhood, or how Suzanne lost 24 pounds in 60 days using Green Coffee Cleanse!

Think about this long and hard because this is the most VITAL secret to getting insanely high conversion rates for this type of offer. The target customer must be 100% convinced that if they break out their credit card RIGHT NOW they will experience the same results that you exposed in your success story on your landing page!

A real story is the best story & sometimes the story comes right from the offer page of the advertiser.

Before we get into the hot traffic sources for Native ads, first let’s enter into a dark and vague world of legal issues with FTC regulations, ad networks and producing testimonials…boo….

THE FTC

Everyone always talks about the bright and profitable side of Affiliate marketing, but if you want to be a professional affiliate marketer you must crawl into the deep and dark world of FTC and advertising laws in your country. The problem here is that many affiliate pages are completely breaking the rules.

Whether you follow these rules or not is your own prerogative, but you should at least know what they are.

Firstly, let’s talk about advertorials.

The more things change, the more they remain the same. We are all familiar with advertorials in newspapers and infomercials on TV. These are in fact advertisements blended
into the existing content you are viewing. Well, online advertorials are just descendants of these formats, suited for the new age medium – the internet. They are a type of native ad. In other words, it is a sales message ‘thinly disguised’ as editorial content.

How ‘thinly disguised’ is what the Federal Trade Commission is asking...

Passing off ads as genuine content and making readers believe that this not an ad amounts to cheating and deception. The FTC has laid down stringent guidelines to ensure that there is no inadvertent (or intentional) deception.

A perfect example of deceptive advertising are those pages you see with a real news reporter, that tries to pass off as a real news site. But it is nothing more than an advertisement.

FTC Guidelines for Online Advertorials

The FTC’s biggest concern is that readers should not be tricked into thinking that the information in the advertorial is coming from a non-biased source. After all, it is paid content
and it is obviously biased. FTC regulation states that advertorials must be ‘clearly and consciously’ marked as an ad. So most of the native ads do have a line towards the end that says ‘content from sponsors’ or 'sponsored ad’. This may meet the requirements of clear and conspicuous’, but is often unnoticeable because it is in a smaller font.

While this was alright earlier, FTC has now (as of 2013) updated its disclosure guidelines, If you are looking at using native ads for advertising your offer, you should consider the following factors.

FTC’s Latest Disclosure Guidelines for Native Ads

1. Placement of the Disclosure
The disclosure statement needs to be placed close to the claim being made. It is not acceptable for publishers to have a single disclosure page to which they merely link their sponsored posts. Every sponsored post or review or article requires its individual disclosure statement appropriately placed.

2. No More End-of-the-Article Disclosures
Blogs are powerful content marketing tools. If you are able to get an established blogger in the niche to review your product/service (positively), it will definitely have an impact in driving traffic and enhancing sales. However, FTC disclosure guidelines now state it is compulsory for the blogger to clearly state that she has been paid for this review or that she received free sample of the product or whatever else the nature of the relationship. And more importantly this statement has to be made at the beginning of the review and not at the end, where it may be missed or may not be read until after the entire review has been read and the reader perhaps deceived.

So What the Heck Does All This Mean?

It is clear that the use of advertorials & promotional blogs is highly effective and affiliates are banking hard from them.

Many ad networks will allow the use of these types of landing pages but they have strict policies you must follow. Sone ad networks don't have any rules. So it is up to you as a marketer to decide where you want to draw the line.

The problem that most affiliates have with the FTC is that the FTC is very vague in defining what suitable disclosure is. Usually the best way to go about it is to speak with your
advertising rep at any of the traffic networks. They can usually tell you what is allowed or not allowed. Be specific with your advertising reps and ask them specifically what you can do or cannot do.
 

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