Protect Your Affiliate Checks From Them

[John Glube]

The FTC Wants You

Do you market any affiliate product or service by email?

Do you operate an affiliate program and rely upon the email marketing efforts of your affiliates?

Then you need to act today to protect your income.

Why? Under the Can Spam Act of 2003, people have to maintain a list of those who have requested to no longer receive commercial email.

Depending on how the rules are written by the FTC to implement the Act, this could destroy people's ability to market affiliate products or services by email.

Let me explain. Some people have suggested this whole Can Spam is no big deal for permission based e-mail marketers. Fine if you think that way, but ... here's the rub.

The opt-out provisions under the Act and the resulting requirements to maintain a do-not-email-list were written to regulate people:

* Marketing their own products or services through the use of opt-out mailing lists;

* Providing mailing services to advertisers who want to market their products or services to these sorts of lists.

But given how the Act is worded, unless the FTC acts to protect the interests of consumers and business by writing the rules properly, these provisions will apply to people who run affirmative consent mailing lists.

An affirmative consent mailing list? This is a list were someone signs up to receive email after having clear disclosure of the content of the messages he or she will receive, what can be called solicited email.

So, what's the concern? The Act requires the merchant whose product or service is promoted in the email message to ensure those who request to no longer receive email about the product or service be placed on a list. The merchant has to ensure marketers do not send advertisements in the future to the people on this list.

This is called a suppression list. Stop and think about this for a second. All kinds of concerns arise for those who send solicited email.

How could this happen? Well in part because the people who wrote the legislation did not have a true understanding of how the micro-business community operates online.

(Remember advocates of opt-out email marketing were leading the charge on the Hill.)

In response, the Act focuses on prohibiting the worst forms of abuse, providing realistic remedial powers, while sweeping everyone else into the same bucket in certain key areas.

True, there is a distinction drawn between commercial email sent with affirmative consent, (what can be called solicited commercial email) but this distinction does not carry over into the suppression list requirements and other areas of the Act, which it should.

(To say this result is off kilter is an understatement.)

The purpose of this post? A call to arms to merchants who run affiliate programs and all those who market affiliate products or services by email.

The FTC wants to write the rules properly. But, to do this the Commission needs to hear from you.

To help you understand the issues read The FTC Wants To Hear From You:

http://www.learnsteps4profit.com/csp.html

(You can upload a PDF copy of the article to make it easier for you to print out and read.)

The article sets out a proposed solution, raises other relevant issues, provides you with additional resources to help you think through the issues and tells you how to provide your comments to the Commission.

Need more? Then read An Open Letter To The FTC: Suppression Lists Will Not Help

http://www.talkbiz.net/ramblings/weblog.php

(This article focuses on the problem of suppression lists for those who send out solicited email.)

The deadline for filing your comments? April 20, 2004.

Run an affiliate program? Then you want to protect your income.

Market affiliate products or services? Want to protect your affiliate income? Then don't delay and post your comments.

For the details on how to post your comments:

http://www.learnsteps4profit.com/csp.html

Unsure of what to say or do?

Marlon Sanders of Amazing Formula and Paul Myers of Talk Biz News have to put together a tutorial to aid you in this process:

http://www.yousubscribed.com/canspam/

People this is serious stuff. You need to act on it today.

John Glube
Toronto, Canada