1. Wise Rep – now, this may not totally be a scam, but it’s advertising that you too can list your wholesale products along side things like lucky brand jeans and buyers are going to come and find them.  When “buyers” click on the lucky brand link, guess what? it’s an affiliate like.  For you, the normal wholesaler selling some invention or product that you’d love to get into walmart, you have to pay $30 a month to list there.

2. Numerous bridal registry sites –  Same model. If you, small company with a website, want to be listed, you’re going to pay a fee. They show you big box stores like crate and barrel, and then use affiliate links to avoid false advertising.  While this isn’t truely a scam, it isn’t exactly honest either.

These models aren’t exactly what affiliate advertisers have in mind. Imagine how the consumer feels when they register or sign up and discover  that their registry isn’t integrated as they thought when they go into the crate and barrel store, or what the person thinks when they’ve paid $30 for a year to find out that they haven’t sold a single wholesale item (because people don’t actually go to the site to place wholesale orders).

Here’s the least you should know.  As an advertiser, the fees are typically less than the big 3.  There are usually less publishers, you won’t find any fortune 500 companies, and many of the affiliates are “mom and pop shop” products.  You’ll also find clickbank type networks that sell software.  I personally am always skeptical of putting a large amount of my budget or energy in any of these programs, although I’ve occasionally found a gem or two. I’ve also gotten burned.  Remember that there tend to be less affiliates in these programs, so you could find a diamond hidden in the rough. But, there’s no guarantee that any product is going to sell, so if the quality of the product isn’t there,  you could also lose your shirt. 

• kolimbo.com
• shareasale.com

More and more advertisers are hesitant to give up the rights for publishers to run PPC campaigns on their brand terms. While it may aggravate the publishers, the reasoning is sometimes sound. For the advertiser, small in-house paid search campaign is sometimes more cost effective than paying commissions, depending on the bid prices and the competition in the market place. A smaller business may pay only $100 per month to cover ppc fees to get some paid search coverage, but find affiliate commissions ranging in the $1,000 range for the same volume of sales. 

There’s also a large concern among advertisers over ad content. If a publisher forgets to turn off an ad for coupon or promotion that’s expired, the company’s customer support phone line may experience a huge volume of calls from customers looking for their “discount”.  At this point, the advertiser is almost always responsible for honoring those discounts, or stuck doing extra work to resolve the issue.

So, the question is, if brand names are off limits, is it possible to run a pay per click campaign successfully without having the brand name as a keyword? The answer is a resounding… it depends. I think maybe the best example of PPC without Brand is ClickBank. Here, hundreds of products get sold without any real previous brand exposure, just on their merits alone through sell pages. And the price points vary from $10 to $100′s.  But I’m not sure the example holds true for every product out there in affiliate land. Insider Tip: Bidding policies may not be fixed in stone.  Contact your advertiser if you have questions about their ppc policy and its restrictions.