Issac G's Blog

After knowing about it for years, but recently seeing a lot of activity from the WSO world in the last month or so, I finally took the plunge and joined The Warrior Forums.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with them, the Warrior Forums are an old and pretty respected forums in the Internet Marketing niche.  Once a paid-only forum (when I was first introduced to it, it cost money and I was too careful over every dollar spent to “risk” joining – sound familiar?), it later changed to a free membership.

Currently, it’s still free to join, with many paid-member-only areas on the site.  As Allen said, the incredible PR value of the forums was causing a lot of folks to take unfair advantage of the free membership to spam the system without contributing to the forums.  Even with high moderation, to keep the content high quality and clean, that was making problems.

So this morning, I finally joined (and paid for the upgraded membership that I foolishly turned down years ago) and really hope that it will prove worthy.  If you’re a member there, make sure to send me a friendship request – my username is “issac”

I just finished reading the update to Clickbank’s terms of services for vendors, and WOW!

They’re taking real steps to help unsuspecting customers remain safe from unscrupulous vendors.

Here’s a short list of the changes:

• No “fake” testimonials or “fake” sellers.

I love this one – I recently saw a product sold on clickbank where the sales page described a “normal” person – actually, a hobo – who climbed from living off the streets to riches within a year of using the traffic methods being advertised in the product.  It made me sick, though, when I found out shortly later that the entire “story” was a made up fairy tale – the person didn’t exist, it hadn’t necessarily transform anyone’s life – it was all a crock of s*%#

No more of that.

Also of personal interest to me is no more “video only” web pages that you can’t stop or pause.

•  No fake scarcity

No more countdowns saying “only 13 minutes left to buy”.  No more “Only 60 37 12 3 remaining.  Buy Now!”  Unless it’s real.  If you write something like that, Clickbank will count how many sales are made, and when that “3″ hits “0″ they won’t let you sell your product any more for another week!  Note that “one time offers” which only really do display once, are still allowed – they’re not banning scarcity, justblatantly  made-up scarcity.

• No more fake discounts

No more saying “This product normally sells for $997, but TODAY ONLY you can get it for just $97!” – again, not unless it’s true.  Clickbank will check the prices, and if you’ve sold the product for a while at $997, you can write it…  But you can’t just plug in a $997 price tag for the sake of offering the discount.

• Limits on One-Time-Offers / Upsells

There’s nothing wrong with an honest upsell!  But no more days of buying a cheap product only to be slammed with tens of offers to confuse and frighten you.  There are now firm limits of how many upsells can be offered, as well as how many “wait one second!” exit offers are allowed

There are a few more, and you can view the full details at Clickbank’s website.

My favorite part of these new rules is that my products already comply with every single one of them!  (Go me!)  How’s that for honest marketing?

Do you know of products that do or don’t comply?  Let me know by commenting!