FTC Guidance Dramatically Impacts Endorsements and Testimonials

The new FTC guidance regarding the use of endorsements and testimonials in your product and service promotions can profoundly impact your business model.  It will serve you well to look into this in depth.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and am in no way either endorsing nor providing a testimonial regarding the new FTC guidance, nor is this pretending to be in any way a legal interpretation of the guidance.  To insure your personal compliance, I strongly recommend that you consult with an attorney who is expert in the interpretation and application of FTC regulations regarding your particular business.

The new FTC guidance release is excerpted below.  You can read the entire 80 or so pages of the Text of The Federal Register Notice here.

The apparent bottom line implications for network, internet  and affiliate marketers are that we now must be far more careful about the use of claims in our review endorsements and the testimonials we employ.  The use of testimonials are especially problematic.

For example, the simple use of  a “Results not Typical” disclaimer for testimonials no longer provides a “safe harbor” as noted in the 3rd paragraph of the release.  Now, if we employ testimonials claiming ‘not typical’ results, we must apparently also include a verifiable disclosure of exactly what is typical.   How are we supposed to know that?   Are testimonials no longer a viable promotional tool?

The 4th paragraph summarizes the new guidance on revealing the “material connections” between endorsers and advertisers.  Basically, any blogger or internet marketer must clearly reveal what and how they stand to gain from any endorsement and/or review of a product.   If you are an affiliate marketer, you must evidently be totally up front with that fact, making it very clear that you stand to profit monetarily in whatever way from your endorsement of a product.

So, I recommend that you take action now to consult with your attorney, if need be, and to thoroughly review your “terms of sale” and “disclaimer notices” to insure compliance.  The FTC is clearly not an agency you want to have to deal with.

The really simple definition of eCommerce is “the electronic exchange of goods or services.”   Given some degree of experience in online marketing, you could actually make some money as a consultant to business owners by teaching them the fundamentals of e commerce.

For example, you could use a website that you have already set up for e-commerce to demonstrate the principles of e commerce.  There are likely to be number of small businesses in your area who do not yet have an Internet presence, and you could become a consultant to them.

Local Small Business Market

It would be relatively simple to make direct contact with the owners small businesses to discuss with them how they can benefit from a presence online.  Their presence could be as simple as offering information about their products or services to prospective customers, even if they don’t intend to sell the products through use of the Internet.

Most localized to small businesses have an established and routine customer base.  However, in order to survive over the long term, they knew need to continually bring in new customers.  Establishing a presence online, which is targeted at needs and people who are local to the business is a key way of establishing a greater local presence in the minds of consumers.

Use Your Knowledge

You can use what you know about search engine optimization and Internet marketing to put together an offer of services that adds value in several ways to these businesses for which you can charge a fee.  Basically, you could prepare an online marketing and business plan that would enable the business owner to establish a presence on the Internet.  That would attract new customers, your.

If you haven’t done this kind of thing before, it’s understandable you may be reluctant to do so or feel that you’re unqualified.  However, consider that there are literally hundreds of turnkey e-commerce packages available.

Affiliate Marketing Plus Consulting

A business owner can purchase an all-in-one package including Web hosting, ready-made advertising, along with all of the information about how to establish their website and achieve high search engine ranking.  These packages generally include extensive software packages that simplify the technology.  It would be relatively easy to serve as a consultant to help the business owner installed such as package.

Given a basic understanding of e-commerce, along with the ability to convey the benefits of e-commerce over regular commerce, you can play very valuable role as a consultant to small business owners who elect to require such e-commerce packages.

Many if not most of these all-in-one e-commerce packages are sold through affiliate marketing.  Basically, the developers of these packages make them available for promotion through a team of affiliates who are paid commissions for each sale.

The idea is simply to select one of these packages to learn, promote, and then teach its use and implementation.  You would then be able to profit from both the commission on the sale of the package, as well as any consulting fees that you may be able to charge your client.

A great ecommerce package to promote is described in detail at GVOCom.Org. This great all-in-one solution combines web hosting, email marketing, online video production, video conferencing, lead generation and all the training you’d ever need to become a consultant as well as a reseller online marketing services.

This will be the first of my Eight Part ‘Network Online Review’ series on many of the most effective ways you can use to drive traffic to your website.   The simple fact is that to be successful as an affiliate marketer, you must have  a website.  Better yet,  you’ll soon learn that you’ll really need multiple websites to achieve true success.

However,  a website alone is not enough.   You also need ways to drive traffic, or to attract traffic to your website.    Equally, if not more important, your website needs to be constructed in such a way that it will actually convert that traffic to sales.  The bottom line is that without these two essential elements, traffic and conversion, you will never achieve success online.

There are basically two ways to drive traffic to your website.  You can either purchase traffic through paid advertising, or you can create it through other promotional means such as Web 2.0 and other so-called ‘organic search’, or ‘search engine optimization (SEO)  means.

Through this series of eight or more articles.  I will review both ways of driving traffic to your website with focus on the ways I have found to be the most effective to do so with a minimal advertising and promotional budget.  I certainly won’t cover every way, but I will cover those that I think are particularly effective.

You need to understand that if you don’t have a lot of time to attract traffic to your affiliate marketing website through the organic search means, you’ll probably have to buy the traffic.  If on the other hand, if you do have the time and inclination to learn the methodology, you can achieve outstanding success using the ‘organic search’ means alone.  This in fact, is the route that I have selected to drive traffic to virtually all of my websites

This article will review the most used way to ‘buy’ traffic on the internet.

Part 1 -  Advertising With Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

Pay per click advertising accounts for roughly one third of Google’s subtsantial and still growing revenue(over $50 billion for Q1, 2009).   You only have to do a Google search to see how PPC works.   All of the ads on the right sidebar are PPC ads, as well as one or two in the highlighted background at the top of the page.

You can place these ads for as low as five cents per click, and they can go for $20 per click or more depending on your competition for the ad space.    You can have an advert up on Google in just five minutes with a potential audience of hundreds of millions.   This is indeed, the fastest possible way to drive traffic to your website, though not inexpensive.  In addition, it is highly likely that whoever clicks on your ad will have high interest in what you are offering.

Hold that in contrast, with literally any other form of advertising, where ads are placed  in various media for thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars in many cases with no guarantee that anyone will even bother to respond in any way.  In PPC, you only pay when people read your ad and do click through to your website or sales page to get further information.  This is an ingenious concept that has only come about with the advent of the Internet.  In addition, you can put ads on other networks than Google to include Yahoo, MSN, and others.

How does it work?

Basically, this advertising form is so targeted because the ads only show on a webpage or search engine result that a person visits because they are looking for something inn response to a search engine query.  When someone types a keyword into Google search, for example, a number of potential information sources relevant to the keyword entered are shown.   The same is true for the pay per click ads that are presented at the top of and in the sidebar of the search results. They are also relevant to the entered search phrase.

When you choose to advertise using PPC, you determine appropriate keywords for your offering, include the key ones in your brief ad copy.You then bid on those and a number of other related keywords to get your ads placed and to achieve  a high level of the ad ranking when those keywords are searched.

Let’s say for example that you choose to bid $.50 on the keyword network marketing.  Because network marketing is such a popular and well searched term, you’re unlikely to get a very high ad placement on a search network because such a popular term might require a bid of $10 or more just to get on the first page of ads for that particular search result, let alone be the first ad on the page.

Now Let’s Look at a Bit More Detail

PPC advertising campaigns are offered by many search engines, but let’s start with the three major PPC search engines.  They are Google, Yahoo, and MSN.  The largest search engine by far these days is Google and this is where you can probably get the most bang for your buck in PPC.  Google gives excellent training on how to use PPC, and once you master the basics, it may be appropriate to branch out onto Yahoo and MSN as well for a bit of additional traffic. You might be able to get better traffic at lower cost on the alternatives once you’ve optimised your ads and keyword terms.

There was a time in the beginning when the PPC marketing was extraordinarily effective at very low cost.  However, as do most good marketing strategies, this particular methodology has become highly competitive.  There are literally hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, who use PPC has a major element of their marketing campaigns.

Because it is so competitive, it is very important that you know what you’re doing in order to operate cost effective PPC campaigns with a reasonable ROI.  If you’re going to be successful, you simply have to be better at it than your competition.

The Search Network versus the Content Network

When you mount a PPC campaign, you can elect to have your ad show up in one or both of two different ways.  The first is called the “search network”, wherein your ads will show up on the sidebar of a search results page.

The other is called a “content network”, wherein your ads will show up in the actual content of webpages on the websites of those who choose to have PPC ads appear on their website, from which they can earn earn a small fee from the advertiser.  When someone clicks on the ad.  You will see ads by Google on many webpages these days.  In fact, so online marketers earn a substantial portion of their income from clickthroughs on the many ads the have allowed to be place on their webpages.

Advantages and Disadvantages

It is believed that when your ad shows up on a search network, you’ll generally get much higher quantity of click throughs on your ads, but the cost may be extraordinarily high to achieve high enough ad placement to achieve the click throughs.  In general, search network ads are much more targeted to the keywords that are being searched for, but the cost to achieve satisfactory placement may be high.

Content ad placement is based on algorithms developed by the search engine companies that attempt  to determine the particular relevancy of an ad to the content of a specific webpage, or blog post.  While you may in fact get more exposure using this methodology, the targeting is likely will likely be much less precise.  Often times when perusing a website with the ads by Google, you’ll sometimes note that the ads that show up on page do not seem to be particularly related to page page content.  The algorithms  For ad placement are not perfect.

To summarize, ads placed in the content network are generally less targeted, but higher volumes of people are likely to see them.  Search network ads will likely produce higher-quality click throughs because the placement of the ads is more relevant to specific keywords being searched.

I’ve tried both and my experience has been that I generally get more effective results in the content network.  When competing in high competition niches like network marketing, the bid prices are so high  to achieve first page or first-place ranking in search network campaigns,  that return on investment is often negative  Basically, by bidding low prices, you may get virtually no clicks on search network ads, but you can still generate a reasonable amount of click through in the content network at that price.

You can get a whole lot more detail on the technical aspects and strategies for PPC marketing by studying the free adwords training that Google provides in their Google Adwords Learning Center.  Click here to go to that free resource.

Now let’s move on to our next post for review for a review of the second sort major source of traffic , which is search engine optimization (SEO) for organic search

Welcome to my website.  This is my introductory post.  I have started this blog site to share with other people online what I have learned and am continuing to learn about how to make money online with affiliate marketing.

There are so many different gurus, opinions, products, tools and myriad of other resources available to the beginning, and even moderately experienced online marketer, that the task and learning can seem overwhelming.  It’s little wonder that the real success rate of those who try is little more than 1-2%.

Because it is getting so much more complicated and is changing so rapidly, even the experienced online marketer can become stressed and confused about where to go next.

Just think about how involved it all is.  You have to start by building a basic understanding of all the tools and knowledge you’ll need.  Then you have to decide on the particular niche you  are going to focus on, create a product or become an affiliate for others, create a network of websites and blogs, figure out how to cost effectively drive traffic to your sites, create effective sales and money page copy, how and when to outsource, form JV partnerships, create videos,use web 2.0 methodology, and it just goes on and on.

Finally, anyone getting into this business needs to understand that it truly will take a monumental amount of work and learning to ultimately achieve success.  I personally work full time in my business.  You simply can’t expect to “get rich” overnight.  For every internet millionaire out there, and there are indeed a few, there are literally tens of  thousands of others who never have, nor ever will be at all successful.   There is no question that this is a very competitive game, but there are great rewards on a number of levels for those who love the challenge.

The bottom line is that those who do succeed are extraordinarily driven and committed to learning the trade, and certainly fully committed to taking action and accepting risk, not to mention the up front investment of considerable funds and learning time.  You really have to love this job to achieve any success.

What I intend to do, hopefully, with this blog is to bring a bit more clarity to the network marketing industry. Basically, I will supply a running chronicle of successful strategies I have employed, high value products I have found, and the most effective tools I have found that you can use.

So, I will attempt to do a number of things over time with this blog site:

1. I will clearly layout a relatively simple blueprint or step by step plan for anyone wanting to make money online.

2. I will provide candid reviews of the best resources, tools, and products, that will help us make money online…and there are many. Some are a good and some our bad.  We need to have the wisdom to tell the difference

3. Most importantly, I’ll try to keep it a simple as possible in communicating to you what works and what does not.

4. I will consider it my job to find and share  of the latest products, technologies, and methods, to make money online.

Rich Keesling