Crackdown on Brand Names
ByAffiliate marketing of physical products has quite a few challenges. I will not list them all here, but rather discuss one point that can make devastating effect on your affiliate marketing campaign. Promoting brand names has advantage of instant recognition and trust of the brand. Would you buy Sony or CornerWiz product?
However, the ugly side of brand promotion is restrictions on the use for brand names. I used to have a site with domain name tiffanybags[keyword] dot com, but had to shut it down after polite request from the brand. Make no mistake – they do watch what is going on with their names.
Another most recent blow was with a company making great jewelry products, but naming them like “Tiffany inspired ring”. Everything was fine for awhile, actually for about 1.5 year, site was making decent profit, but then – bummm. Company was suited by the brand and had to remove all “brand-like” names (see email below from their affiliate manager). What it means to me? I have to remove 400+ blog posts I slowly built over a year period from the company product datafeed.
I would be thrilled if somebody will say “Viliat-inspired”, but obviously brand names view it as attack on the brand.
So, next time you’ll be promoting brand names – make sure you deal directly with the brand and follow their rules, or a company is authorized reseller for the brand. Also, be careful with registering domain names having brand name as a part of the domain.
Hope you learnt a valuable lesson today.
7 Comments
November 16th, 2008 at 9:00 am
Very very good point. A LOT of people found that out trying to use eBay (or similar) in their domains also.
Dennis Edells last blog post..We Will Stay Do-Follow, But…
November 16th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
What about iPhone websites? I see tons of them everywhere and news ones created daily. It might not be the same with tech.
Atleast i hope not, since i own an iPhone site.
November 16th, 2008 at 6:51 pm
@Missy - tech seems to be more forgiving, but you really never know. You can use iPhone site as long as Apple will not ask you to shut it down. Basically, whenever we use brand name in the URL, we are at the brand mercy.
the most aggressive brands are in jewelry, clothes, bags and accessories markets.
November 17th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
maybe because hose are the most “stolen” offline as well…just a thought.
Dennis Edells last blog post..UPDATED - We Will Stay Do-Follow, But…
November 17th, 2008 at 7:16 pm
@Dennis - I think so too.
December 3rd, 2008 at 1:42 am
First experience I had with getting a brand name barred was some AdWords ads that were removed for using the word Patagonia. I had to convince them that we were really selling (which we were), trips to the region of South America that is named Patagonia.
Even though it had nothing to do with the clothing company, somebody’s watchdogs were out to prevent us from running that ad. End result though, Google did recognize the the site really WAS about travel in South America, and let us use it.
December 3rd, 2008 at 9:29 am
Thanks Deanna for sharing your experience. I had quite a few situations with AdWords ads myself. One example is Google dropped my campaign containing words “satellite tv” and the like. Apparently big satellite companies where not happy by me promoting competing products.