My thought on this – the world of affiliate marketing is going to change in a hurry as the FTC catches on, and big traditional ad money wants to get a piece of the pie.  Standards that already exist in magazines, tv, and news print are going to have to be upheld on the wild wild web, or else.  The problem?  Countries outside the US – couldn’t you just move your company to someplace outside the FTC’s jurisdiction?

For those of us who can’t pick up our company and move to – say Mexico or Costa Rica, the options are limited.  Paste a big red disclaimer on the bottom and hope it’s enough, change business models, or hope you don’t get caught.

If you haven’t gone, it’s a great time.  I’ve been there twice.  My best experience was probably networking, and getting the chance to hear some of the seminars done by guys like Jeremy Palmer and Shoe Money (or some other guy that I have confused with Shoe Money…).  Anyway, I came home with a lot of book marked websites, and notes scribbled on a piece of paper. 

The networking is pretty cool. My biggest regret is that I didn’t ACT on at least one of the clients that I met when I attended as a publisher. (My first year, I was an advertiser… I made lots of phone calls, most of which no one returned..lol)  Being at CJU is a great time to work a better commission, get out there, and become a name in the industry.

So, how does this affect you?  Well, you could say it doesn’t.  Your product review site or product review blog prints honest information and comparisons.  But what if someone makes a purchase and doesn’t like the item, or says that you promised that an ipod would hold 3,000 songs and it holds 2,000?  Under these new laws, you may find yourself in a court case or class action lawsuit. 

What can you do? Well, first you can make sure that if you are using an affiliate site model of product reviews or comparisons that they are as accurate as possible, and that you aren’t making false claims. You can attempt to only restate only what is said on the website, the item packaging itself or the insert.  Make sure you actually physically have  the product before you review it. Don’t state discounts that don’t exist, etc. In many cases, such as banking and loan websites, these are already requirements. 

Of course one problem with all of this is that the web is huge and the FTC can’t possibly patrol it, nor will the FTC patrol it most likely.  So my guess is that unless there are class action lawsuits taken out against the largest infringers, I’m not sure how they can possibly hope to make something like that stick. 

Here are some places where the FTC could crack down. The FTC prohibits “ deceptive pricing” in print media.   This means that the use of phrases like a $499 value for 39.95 may come under some scrutiny, as the item has never sold or priced for $499.  Also, comparisons that are biased (this is the better product because it has an affiliate program), could come under higher scrutiny, as well as standard product review sites.  

It’s important to remember that this type of regulation is already in place for tv and print media. So, it shouldn’t be too hard to follow. For more information, you can read more about FTC advertising guidelines. 

Why go? Well, first of all, it’s a good place to meet with your affiliate advertisers, as well as potential advertisers, other publishers, and rub shoulders with the guys who are already making big $$$ in the industry.  The second reason is that if you’re serious about affiliate marketing, you can pick up a few tips and tricks (more than a few actually), and stay ahead of the game.  I learned about myspace and facebook at my first CJU, for example, and how social networking was poised to take over the world.

I had no idea that you could get Google to allow you to “own” your own copyright on their adwords network. That’s kinda cool.  On the flip side, I’m going to be a lot more careful in the future about what I say in my adword ads.

For those of you who think this is not relevant to affiliate marketing, think again.  Verizon claimed that showing competitve ads on these pages was defrauding the public, and well, cybersquatting.  That means, if you think you’re going to buy a brand name and turn it into a landing page or redirect as part of googles adsense or some other affiliate program, you might want to check the fine print before you end up as part of one of the lawsuits.  Brand names can be a very sticky situation, because you’re not the trademark holder. 

Btw, this doesn’t only happen to big guys.  Yours truly recently received a letter in the mail demanding a domain name be turned over immediately to it’s “owner” because of trademark infringement.  I had been a member of said company’s affiliate program, and, the worst part was, the domain didn’t even make a profit, so i stopped using it and turned off the auto-renew.  

Just a warning to all of you affiliate marketers!!