My Passive Income Online Blog

Recently the issue of being banned from affiliate marketing programs (like Amazon) and advertising programs (like AdSense) has really been on my mind.

Although after nearly three years in this industry I have not yet been banned from a single advertising or affiliate program, I feel that it is very likely that this will happen down the road at some point – and I believe anyone involved in internet marketing needs to work from the assumption that someday they will likely be banned from the programs they participate in – and build their business based on that assumption.

In other words: you should plan for a ban.

Although you may work hard to stay on the right side of TOS’s of the different programs you use, you should not assume that this will be enough to protect your business. Sure, many people are banned from programs for good reasons (such as cookie stuffing, clicking their own ads, using deceptive linking practices, stolen content and more). And to be honest, I’ve often in the past been kind of nonchalant about program bans, assuming that if I follow good practices I’ll be safe.

But this is no longer the case.

Two things happened this week that really made me reevaluate my position on program bans:

First, a well known internet marketer I really respect had his Amazon account banned.

Although I’m not going to publicly “out” this person on my blog (although he’s welcome to identify himself, if he wants), many of my readers will know who I am talking about. I know for a fact that this marketer puts together quality sites, and that the reasons for his ban are not clear at all.

Although Amazon is often thought as a “safer” program by many internet marketers than programs like AdSense in terms of banning associates, a quick search of the internet will show you that Amazon bans are actually not that uncommon. And just like AdSense, once you are banned from the program you will likely receive little information about what aspect of their TOS you violated and why they instituted the ban.

Even if you think you are following all the proper rules and regulations, you can’t assume this will protect you. Programs Terms of Service change frequently and you might miss a change, or you might have a site unknowingly hacked, your affiliate ID stolen, or you might just get a grumpy, new or overly zealous program reviewer visiting one of your sites one day who takes issue with one small oversight.

Don’t expect a warning from most programs either – they will simply ban you outright. This can be incredibly frustrating for affiliates who are trying hard to follow the rules, since they will have little information about what they did wrong or what they need to do to fix their sites in order to make them compliant.

The second thing that happened is a bizarre incident with someone who took issue with a negative review I had posted on one of my Amazon sites.

In an effort to provide consumers with useful information, I have some negative product reviews on some of my websites. Usually in these reviews I will point out that a product has received many negative reviews and had complaints made about it at Amazon.com.

Someone apparently thought one of these negative reviews was unfair, and earlier this week I started receiving dozens of threatening emails from a woman telling me that she was reporting me to Amazon, Google, my hosting company, domain registrar, different manufacturers, telling them to send me a “cease and desist” notice (for what, I’m not completely clear) and so on. Initially I thought it was the actual manufacturer of the product who was emailing me, but some further emails clarified that she was not . But for some reason she felt compelled to “protect” the manufacturer from my negative review of their product on my website.

Normally I would have simply dismissed her as a nutcase (or a competitor attempting to sabotage my business) and just ignored these emails. However, given that I was already a bit nervous about being banned from Amazon after the incident I heard about earlier in the week, I decided to check my StatCounter data for my Amazon sites.

Sure enough, there was evidence that within hours of this woman starting to send me these emails, Amazon had been to the website in question as well as to several other websites that I had linked to from it using my Blogroll links. Each site had several pages visited from an Amazon IP address, spending a few second on each page.

Although I believe that the sites in question are complaint with Amazon’s TOS, after hearing about the ban earlier in the week, I started feeling nervous. I took some actions to ban the instigator’s IP address from visiting my websites (which will probably be unsuccessful) and changed some of the text of the links so that it was completely clear that if you clicked the link you would be taken to Amazon.com. (None of the links were cloaked, but some of the affiliate links would simply say “Click Here to Learn More” and I changed them so that they now say something like “Click Here To Learn More From Amazon” or something similar). I ended up spending hours going over each and every page, trying to see if there was anything I should fix.

It’s now been several days since this incident happens, and I haven’t yet heard anything bad from Amazon (or my hosting company, domain registrar, Google or any of the companies she claimed she was making complaints to about my website).

Still, I have lost quite a bit of sleep over this during the past few days. And I am starting to get pissed off.

I’m mostly angry that this woman succeeded in making me afraid – which was undoubtedly her goal in the first place. However, reading posts by fellow members over at The Pond, it is clear that many of us involved in internet marketing are afraid of being banned from this affiliate program or that – and that there are many sad stories there to support these fears as well.

I’m tired of it! I no longer want to live in fear of any program banning me down the road.

So I’ve resolved that I will no longer be afraid of any program banning me. Instead, I am going to simply expect that it will happen. I am going to run my business on the assumption that this it will happen at some point to me – and I am going to take steps now to make sure that when it happens, it will not be devastating to me or my business.

I’ve noticed that there seems to be two ways that most internet marketers respond to bans when they happen to them:

1) Complain on blogs and forums about the ban, get discouraged, decide that internet marketing is just too unpredictable of an income base to rely on for a living, and and move onto something else – like getting a “real” job

or

2) Complain on blogs and forums about the ban, get discouraged, then get mad, and then decide that they are going to fight back and build an even stronger and more profitable business.

I actually don’t think there is anything wrong with either approach. First, I think it is completely fair to complain about a ban, especially if you are trying hard to stay within the TOS’s of a program.

And I also think that it is a perfectly acceptable to decide not to pursue internet marketing if you can’t or don’t want to live with the constant possibility of such bans occurring.

If you are serious about being in this business, you should probably have a hard think about which kind of person you really are – how you will respond to a ban when it happens – before you invest even more of your time and effort in this business.

Fortunately, if you are a person who will take approach #2 (getting mad), one of the good things is that you will likely end up building a better and more successful business after a ban when it happens. In the case of the internet marketer I mentioned earlier, the ban forced him to look at many different affiliate programs and he found several that actually pay much better than Amazon did – and he is now earning more money from these products as a result.

It will also probably encourage you to build sites that have a better user experience, better conversions, and it will encourage you to take the necessary steps to safeguard your business.

But you should still take steps NOW to safeguard your business – before getting banned.

Towards this end, I would suggest you consider diversifying both your income streams and your program accounts.

Diversifying Your Income Streams

Take a hard look at all of your affiliate and advertising program earnings. If you are earning nearly all your income from a single source, then you really need to diversify your income streams.

I, personally, don’t like over 50% of my income coming from any single program. Currently only about 20% of my income is earned from Amazon, and although if they were to ban me tomorrow it would be a setback – it would not be devastating.

I have never wanted to have all my earnings in a single program, and because of this reason I’ve chosen to focus my efforts on three different sources for my income (AdSense, ClickBank and Amazon) – and I hope to soon add to this a fourth source as well (Commission Junction).

Diversifying your programs does has its downsides as well. To start, it is much easier to just work with one program you know well. In fact, for people who are just starting out, I would suggest you stick to one program at first, while you are learning about how to build a website and about internet marketing more generally.

However, after you “learn the ropes” you should definitely look into diversifying. Fortunately there are many excellent books you can read that will help your learning curve be easier as you diversify. However, don’t be tempted by too many shiny objects or ebooks. You don’t need to read ten different books about how to make a living from each program. Just reading one good one will be enough to get you started with any new program.

Here are a few that I think are good choices for the programs that I’m currently using:

AdSense – 100K Blueprint (the 100K members forum also has a lot of good information). This is a good beginner’s guide to setting up an AdSense site.

Amazon – Wanda and Paula’s ebook Amazonian Profit Plan is really good, and you can also check out their blog for a lot of free information as well. Zen Duck Dave also has a good book on affiliating with Amazon as well.

ClickBank – For those interested in ClickBank, the Affilorama forum/program is probably one of the best places to start.

Commission Junction – James Hussey just wrote a good ebook on this CJ program that I’ve reviewed here.

However, there are literally hundreds of different affiliate programs you can pursue, and you don’t need to limit yourself to these ones. There are some good reasons why programs like Amazon and Adsense are so popular – many of them pay or convert quite well, have many useful affiliate tools, and are often quite easy to learn to use as well – but you don’t have to limit yourself to these programs. You should consider researching different affiliate programs in your niches part of your job.

Overall, what’s most important to keep in mind is that you really need to diversify your business beyond a single program. Many of these programs will ban you for life, and although may eventually be able find a way around the ban, you do need to have other options to earn a full time income in case this happens (or when this happens).

Diversify Within Your Programs As Well

I also have a new “rule” for myself: Once I reach the $1000 earning mark with any program, I will diversify within that program as well.

What this means for me is that I will open up a different account for that program using a LLC (limited liability corporation). For those who live in the United States, LLC’s are relatively easy corporations to form, and most programs will allow you to open an account in a corporation’s name. You should be aware that you will also need a bank account for your LLC so that you can deposit checks or funds made payable to the LLC. Also, you need to check your state’s regulations regarding any special provisions regarding taxes and reporting for your LLC – and make sure they are set up correctly.

For those who don’t live in the U.S., setting up a LLC will likely be it more complicated – and unfortunately I can’t offer much advice in this matter. Although you likely can still form a LLC in the United States, you may actually need to be physically present here to establish a bank account or file other paperwork. I  imagine that you might be able to set up a corporation in your own country (depending on the regulations) and use that instead, but I really don’t have any experience in this regards. You also might look into forming a partnership with an individual in the United States as well. I’m sure all these strategies have their upsides and downsides – but I encourage you to do some research and try to find an option that works for you.

I also try to keep these accounts as separate as possible. I do not move websites between accounts.  I use different addresses, emails, IPs and computers to access the accounts. (I actually use a virtual server to access the separate accounts, but you could use different computers at work and home to access the separate accounts, for example, if you want to do this as well).

Besides dealing with individual account bans, there are other good reasons to diversify your earnings within a program.

Although you will hopefully never have to deal with a situation similar I faced this week, I can guarantee you will have to deal with competitors. And some of them will engage in some very nasty tactics to undermine your business!

By having different accounts it will be harder for your competitors to find and copy or sabotage all your sites in a single swoop (there are many websites that will allow you to find all the websites associated with an certain affiliate ID).

You may want to also consider setting up a LLC in a state that seems unlikely to use nexus tax collection practices (which has led Amazon and other affiliate programs to institute bans against all affiliates living in certain U.S. states).

In short, I believe it is just a good business practice for all internet marketers making significant earnings with any program.

Finally, you may also want to take additional steps to diversify such things as your website inventory and your website layouts (for example, don’t use the same WordPress theme on all your websites – mix it up). Although I know “authority websites” are all the rage now, having multiple income earnings websites will offer some protection from things like SERP drops and competitors.

If you do have multiple websites, consider hosting some of your websites on different servers as well. Although this can be a bit expensive, if you can afford to do so it will offer you some additional protections (in case a server gets fried, or the host for some reason freezes or cancels your account, among other things). Use different domain registars too.

You might think this is over the top, but keep in mind that even if you follow excellent business practices – your competitors may not, and they can potentially do a lot of damage to your business with false allegations and other nasty tactics. You may even want to look into things like business liability insurance as well, especially as you grow your business.

You don’t need to be paranoid of bad things happening to you. You just need to take some steps to protect your business and limit your losses when they do.

Don’t live your life in fear. Shit happens. Just plan for it.

I know I’ve been a bit quiet lately, as have many other internet marketers whose blogs I follow. I imagine many people are busy working on their “money sites” – I know that I’ve been doing so. Although I really enjoy blogging on this website, when my time is constrained I really need to focus on the sites that make me money. And my work time has been very limited of late, for both good and bad reasons.

Probably the best reason I’ve been absent of late is that I had my first vacation in almost four years! I just returned from spending two weeks in California, a well needed break from the overcast and cold climate of the Pacific Northwest (and a serious vitamin D deficiency). That’s my son in the photo on the left enjoying the carousel at Santa Cruz (which is much more fun than the Google one!). I’m now back and rested.

Unfortunately, I’m also about to check my mother into the hospital for a five hour back surgery. She suffered a serious fall recently and can no longer stand up straight. Life is never boring, that’s for sure!

After promising great things in my “Year Ahead” post, I’ve had a slow, slow start to the year. My earnings have pretty much been stagnant for the past two months, and although there has been a lot of changes with Google lately, in all honesty, the blame is all on me. I’ve simply not been doing the work in terms of building backlinks or adding content to my sites.

However, since returning from California, I’ve been working hard and I’m expecting really good numbers for March. In particular, my ClickBank earnings have started to shoot up.

Take a look at this recent screen shot from my main ClickBank account. While in January and the beginning of February, I was having trouble even breaking the $100 mark each week with my CB earnings – the past three weeks have seen a steady improvement. In fact, in the last week (ending 3/6) I was over the $200 mark for the first time since last September! And I was way over as well – nearly hitting the $300 mark.

Many of these earnings are coming from different affiliate programs than what I usually make my earnings from. These are mainly sites that I’ve been targeting using the BuildMyRank network.

Unfortunately, BMR has closed its doors to new members (although they have a waiting list). They state this is so they can build the network out to deal with the current membership base. But there has also been a lot of talk lately on different forums about many blog networks recently suffering massive deindexing by Google. I’m not sure how hard BMR was hit by this – I’ve noticed some deindexing, but by and large the network seems pretty intact to me. Still, if you use BMR or another similar network and have noticed your sites slipping in rankings, you might want to see if you have lost some links from these networks.

For me, although I have no plans to give up on my BMR membership any time soon (given that it is still working great for me, personally), this does really encourage me to continue building out my own personal blog and homepage networks. With your own blog network, you can control both the rate of posting and the content on the network. In recent months, I’ve put more and more effort to make the blogs I add into my own network have better content on them and be more capable of passing a “manual review”.  

So far, I’ve only had one blog in my personal network ever deindexed (out of 35 blogs total), and in all honesty – it deserved it. The blog that was deindexed was originally a Portuguese language blog, so when I added it to my homepage blog network, I wrote some content, translated it (using Google translate) into Portuguese and then added English language backlinks randomly into the content. It was an experiment that failed (although the blog survived for nearly a year before being deindexed). Lesson learned.

Now any new blogs I add to my homepage network only have high quality content on them – no more random keywords – satellite sites, really, rather than one page homepage wonders. And blogs that I add to my personal blog posting network have very well spun content, images, video and more.

Recently Google announced that they’ve made nearly 40 changes to their search algorithm in February. The one that got the most attention from most internet marketers is their vaguely worded change to evaluating backlinks:

“We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.”

There has been massive speculation about what this means. I’ve read speculation about it being everything from turning off the do-follow attribute (unlikely), to anchor text variation, to devaluing HTML signals, age of link and even the page rank factor. In all honesty, no one knows yet, but if you want to vote, SEroundtable is doing a poll.

I have no idea myself what the change is, but I would guess it might have to do with something like html attributes. I know that anchor text variation is something that many people are pointing to these days. However, I’m one of the few internet marketers left these days who generally does not vary anchor text much. And the sites I’ve seen a real boost to of late are the ones where I haven’t varied my anchor text much (or at all). And the sites that are suffering are the ones that I have varied my anchor text a lot. So I’m certainly not convinced yet that this is the change they made, and I would encourage others to do their own testing before making up their mind in such matters.

OK – now on to my (somewhat pathetic) income reports for the past few months. (Including my last numbers for December as well, since it’s been so long since my last update):

                                                 December           January          February

AdSense                             $602.56                 $546.83             $405.70
ClickBank                           $256.89                 $491.79             $476.94
Amazon                               $395.09                $226.99             $263.62
Other Programs                $104.54                   $90.31             $196.85
Ad Revenue                        $138.84                $120.00             $0

Total                                   $1497.90               $1475.92            $1343.11

In general, my earnings have been consistent but poor. February’s numbers are a bit lower, but there are also two fewer days in the month when compared to December and January, so all in all they aren’t down that much. February’s numbers also don’t have any ad revenue reported either (this revenue comes from selling links on existing websites – something I only do on an occasional basis).

AdSense took a bit of a hit in February, which was frustrating. Especially since my traffic was actually up to my main earner – but the pay per click dropped quite a bit.  ClickBank is way up from where it was in December, however, while Amazon sales were down from December. These are really just seasonal changes – December is always a really good month for Amazon, and a bad one for ClickBank (at least for me).

My expenses for the past three months have been pretty consistent as well:

                                                  December           January          February

Outsourcing                          $268.14                $61.72              $0
Backlinking Tools &
Subscriptions                       $69.00                   $69.00             $136.00
Other (Domains,
Hosting & Aweber)              $242.17                 $299.55            $278.03

Total                                         $579.31               $430.27          $414.03

In February, I started testing a new “hands off” backlinking service (something I’m really in need of more of) that a few internet marketers I really respect have been recommending. Once I have a better idea of how the service performs for me, I’ll report to you all about it.

Also, as I mentioned earlier, I’m expecting a nice boost to my income in March. The past two weeks earnings have been the best so far of the year, and hopefully this trend will continue through March and beyond. I’m also hoping to be adding a new source of revenue to my income reports soon: Commission Junction – thanks in large part to a new book just put out by my IM buddy James (“The Average Genius”). You can read all about this book in my review below.

Thanks all for reading!

- Michelle