New FTC Endorsement Rules
There has been a lot of buzz regarding the new FTC endorsement rules, so I decided to dig down deep and see the actual notification by myself. The new FTC Endorsement rule will be in effect from December 1st 2009. So read it, consult your lawyer and make changes to your disclaimer or the way you promote or endorse affiliate product..wonder where its gonna end..The new FTC endorsement rules covers almost everything.
The new FTC endorsement rules cover all sorts of third party testimonials and endorsements—by consumers, experts and celebrities. If your promotions use customer or consumer endorsements, the FTC requires that the results described must be typical or, if not, you should “clearly and conspicuously” disclose that the results presented are not typical. Also, such customers should be “bona fide” buyers of your product, and not, for example, a fictitious person or your cousin who is doing you a favor. For expert endorsements, the person involved should have special knowledge that qualifies him or her to make the endorsement, e.g., if you use a doctor to sell a diet plan, that doctor shouldn’t be an eye doctor, but have special knowledge in the area of nutrition.
FTC requires all endorsements to disclose any “material connection” between the vendor and the advertiser. For example, if an affiliate runs a website offering an “independent review” of two products and gives a favorable review of one, they should disclose the fact that they are receiving a commission from the sale of that product. These rules also apply to third parties, such as bloggers, who receive a free product and are asked to do a review. Under the new FTC rules, not only should the blogger disclose he got the product for free but the vendor who gave him the product should make some effort to make sure that the blogger makes that disclosure.
So does that mean an end to “Super Hyped Testimonials” or Floggers (Fake Bloggers Endorsing Products), I guess so. Also what really surprises me is that I actually have to purchase a product before I can endorse me..Does That Make any sense?
Well, here is the latest FTC Notification from there official website website:
For Release: 10/05/2009
FTC Publishes Final Guides Governing Endorsements, Testimonials
Changes Affect Testimonial Advertisements, Bloggers, Celebrity Endorsements
The Federal Trade Commission today announced that it has approved final revisions to the guidance it gives to advertisers on how to keep their endorsement and testimonial ads in line with the FTC Act.
The notice incorporates several changes to the FTC’s Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising, which address endorsements by consumers, experts, organizations, and celebrities, as well as the disclosure of important connections between advertisers and endorsers. The Guides were last updated in 1980.
Under the revised Guides, advertisements that feature a consumer and convey his or her experience with a product or service as typical when that is not the case will be required to clearly disclose the results that consumers can generally expect. In contrast to the 1980 version of the Guides – which allowed advertisers to describe unusual results in a testimonial as long as they included a disclaimer such as “results not typical” – the revised Guides no longer contain this safe harbor.
The revised Guides also add new examples to illustrate the long standing principle that “material connections” (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers – connections that consumers would not expect – must be disclosed. These examples address what constitutes an endorsement when the message is conveyed by bloggers or other “word-of-mouth” marketers. The revised Guides specify that while decisions will be reached on a case-by-case basis, the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service. Likewise, if a company refers in an advertisement to the findings of a research organization that conducted research sponsored by the company, the advertisement must disclose the connection between the advertiser and the research organization. And a paid endorsement – like any other advertisement – is deceptive if it makes false or misleading claims.
Celebrity endorsers also are addressed in the revised Guides. While the 1980 Guides did not explicitly state that endorsers as well as advertisers could be liable under the FTC Act for statements they make in an endorsement, the revised Guides reflect Commission case law and clearly state that both advertisers and endorsers may be liable for false or unsubstantiated claims made in an endorsement – or for failure to disclose material connections between the advertiser and endorsers. The revised Guides also make it clear that celebrities have a duty to disclose their relationships with advertisers when making endorsements outside the context of traditional ads, such as on talk shows or in social media.
The Guides are administrative interpretations of the law intended to help advertisers comply with the Federal Trade Commission Act; they are not binding law themselves. In any law enforcement action challenging the allegedly deceptive use of testimonials or endorsements, the Commission would have the burden of proving that the challenged conduct violates the FTC Act.
The Commission vote approving issuance of the Federal Register notice detailing the changes was 4-0. The notice will be published in the Federal Register shortly, and is available now on the FTC’s Web site as a link to this press release. Copies also are available from the FTC’s Consumer Response Center, Room 130, 600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Washington, DC 20580.
The Federal Trade Commission works for consumers to prevent fraudulent, deceptive, and unfair business practices and to provide information to help spot, stop, and avoid them. To file a complaint in English or Spanish, visit the FTC’s online Complaint Assistant or call 1-877-FTC-HELP (1-877-382-4357). The FTC enters complaints into Consumer Sentinel, a secure, online database available to more than 1,700 civil and criminal law enforcement agencies in the U.S. and abroad. The FTC’s Web site provides free information on a variety of consumer topics.
- MEDIA CONTACT:
- Betsy Lordan
Office of Public Affairs
202-326-3707 - STAFF CONTACT:
- Richard Cleland
Bureau of Consumer Protection
202-326-3088
(FTC File No. P034520)
Taken from http://ftc.gov/opa/2009/10/endortest.shtm
Google Chrome OS Launching Soon
Hello Guys!!
Google is on a Roll..we have already discussed Google Wave and Google Go now Google is all set to drop its bomb on Microsoft with Google Chrome OS or Google Operating System.
The Project was “Made Public” in July 2009 at the Official Google Blog and now we are hearing that It will be ready for launch within the few weeks. But before you get too excited you should know what its all about and what we can expect from Google Chrome Operating System.
Google has taken a different approach while developing Google Chrome OS, with the passage of time and revolution in the application industry why do you need an Operating System in the first place. Imagine when all the functions of operating system will be handled by web applications. For example The desktop mail client could be replaced by Gmail, the calendaring application could be replaced by Google Calendar, the office suite has lightweight alternatives: Google Docs and Zoho, it makes more sense to use an online feed reader like Google Reader, your scientific calculator is less powerful than Wolfram Alpha.
The Only hurdle that Google has to overcome is the drivers for the hard wares. Google is mostly relying on the manufacturers for supplying the drivers for the Google Operating System. Lets see how that works out. Also the Google Chrome OS will target mainly the Netbooks during its initial phase before rolling out Chrome OS . That makes sense..since most of the netbook users are mostly web bugs 
no offense there.
A Netbook Running On Google Chrome OS
But the message I want to spread out is Google is Moving Fast way too fast to keep up the pace and we need a company like Google to break the unethical and monopolistic approach of Microsoft. Lets say 5-6 years from now and we will have much better options rather than seeing Operating System and Internet the way MICROSOFT wants us to see & believe. Google Rocks
Off Page Search Engine Optimization
Off Page Search Engine Optimization
Hello Readers,
This is the 2nd part in the Search Engine Optimization Series. If you haven’t read the 1st part “On Page Search Engine Optimization”, kindly go through it.
Off Page SEO: “The aspect of a website that is not located on the site itself, rather elsewhere on the web, but can influence the ranking of this website”
Off Page SEO mainly includes the positive link building exercise. In current scenario off page SEO is thought to be much more important than On Page SEO. Off page SEO is easy to understand but very difficult to implement.
Here I will give you a general idea about off page SEO. Each element will be discussed in detail in future posts. So make sure you subscribe to the blog.
Before I go further here is the quick note about Link Building:
The aspect of a website Link Building is the process of creating inbound links to one’s own website. This can be done by reciprocal links, being listed in e-zines, newsletters, directories, search engines, etc. Link building is one of the best ways to make your site popular. There are few types of linking one of which is reciprocal links (your page is linking back to website) and the other way is one way links.
Make sure you subscribe to the blog to get notified as soon as write about Link building In Detail
Let us discuss various elements of Off Page SEO
1-Quality Link Building: The single most important factor that gets you ranked high on Google and other search engines. The more people that link to your site the better. The Higher the page rank of that site the better and the more relevant those sites the better! This can be most difficult part of the off page SEO mainly because the webmaster is either Too Lazy or Too Impatient. Make sure slow and steady approach is the best way to deal with it.
2-Domain Age: The older the better and the longer registered for the better! If your domain name is registered for years to come Google will take you as a serious site that plans of being around for a while and providing quality content.
3-Neither too fast nor too slow: As mentioned earlier, it is the hardest element of Off page SEO and main reason why people fail in it is either too lazy or too impatient. The reason most people mess up is either because they try to do everything at once and get it over with, or they get tired of doing off page SEO techniques and stop doing it all together. The toughest part of off page SEO, to me at least, is keeping up with the slow and steady pace day in and day out.
I think that is enough for know the basics about off page SEO. I will be writing about each elements in detail and discussing them to CORE so as i said be patient and make sure you subscribe to the blog!!
Cheers
Top 5 Twitter Tools For Business
Twitter Tools
Twitter is a micro blogging platform which allows you to publish short messages. In recent years Twitter has surpassed all expectations and currently its the force to reckon with in online arena. Smart companies just cant ignore something which is so huge. So here are the Top Five Twitter Tools For Business as described by Miguel Cancino
Now that Twitter’s novelty as a micro-blogging platform has worn off, smart individuals and companies are thinking of ways they can leverage this new technology to improve their lives and businesses. Yesterday, Noah Mallin wrote about how businesses can user Twitter to find qualified leads and to understand the needs of their clients.
Today, I thought it would be helpful to point to some tools that can streamline this process, and can provide overarching business intelligence for your company. The following are my top five picks for the most valuable tools that can help your company gain valuable business intelligence from Twitter.
TweetScan: When it comes to business intelligence, your first priority should always be to know and track what is being said about your company. TweetScan is a free service that will monitor a set of keywords, such as your company name or industry, and automatically send you E-mail alerts whenever somebody “tweets” about those terms. Think Google Alerts for Twitter.
Twist: Smart companies stay ahead of their competitors by keeping on top of trends. Twist is a great tool that lets you quickly compare the frequency of conversation around selected terms, allowing you to see what’s hot and what’s not. Furthermore, if you notice a spike in conversation on a particular day, you can drill down and see the actual “tweets” that make up the surge. In short, Twist is a great way to analyze trends.
Twellow: If your business markets to a particular vertical, than it is important to find, follow, and create relationships with people in that industry segment. Twellow is a search directory that goes one step further by slotting individuals and businesses on Twitter into industry verticals/categories. Twellow is one of the best ways to find individuals in your target market.
Monitter: If you’re interested in comparing your company, product, or services to that of your competitors, Monitter is a great tool. Enter 3 keywords, such as your company and two primary competitors, and Monitter will show you a streaming real-time list of what people are saying about you and your competitors. If your company has multiple products, you can also use this tool to see how various products are viewed compared to one another.
Bit.ly: Though not a Twitter-specific tool, Bit.ly lends itself quite well to Twitter. This URL shortening tool, which helps you keep your “tweets” to 140 characters, also provides interesting link-analytics. If you’re interested in tracking and analyzing how well your links (to your company’s products, services, etc.) perform when you seed them in Twitter, this is the tool for you. Bit.ly allows you to track the number of clicks, referring sites, clicks by country, and more. The end-goal should always be to determine which of your links are performing well and why.
Once you add these Twitter tools to your company’s arsenal you can begin to leverage Twitter for critical business, competitor, and industry intelligence.
On Page Search Engine Optimization
On Page Search Engine Optimization
Hello Readers,
This post will let you know how to do apply basic search engine optimization to get your website rank better on Google and other search engine.
Search Engine Optimization has two parts:
1- On page SEO
2- Off page SEO
In this post we will talk about On Page Search engine optimization. Make sure you subscribe to this blog so that you get notified when I write about Off Page SEO
This refers to the changes you do on your website itself to get it ranked better. Basically it refers to the editing of your webpage in such a way that Google finds it easier to locate it and then rank it when a surfer is searching for a particular topic.
On page SEO elements: These are the most important things to keep in mind while to do on page search engine optimization:
a-The Title Tag
<title>Your title here</title>
Make sure that the webpages search term “keyword” is included in the title tag. Write the search term upfront and then if you want you can use characters and colons to separate it let’s say you are targeting keyword “Dog Training”. You can write it as “Dog Training: Get Your Dog Trained At Home”
b-The Description Tag
<meta name=”description” content=”your description”>
Make sure you write a description related to the webpage including the search term at least once or preferably twice in it. Stuffing keywords won’t do any good rather harm your rankings. Surfer should know what the page is all about.
c- The Keywords Tag
<meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword1, keyword2″>
Here you write down the keywords that you are targeting. Make sure the most important ones are in the beginning and related to the webpage. You can write keywords or key phrases.
d-The H Tag
<Hn>your heading words</Hn>
“n” here refers to the number 1 to 6.The biggest heading size being 1. H tags are given more weight than ordinary text and, the bigger the H size, the more weight it receives. So include the target search term in H tags at least once on the page, and two or three times if possible. Also, place the first H tag as near to the top of the page as possible.
e- Bold Text
The bold texts in your webpage are given more preference than the ordinary text in your webpage but less than the H tags. So it makes sense to enclose the search term in bold when it is used in the text
f- Ordinary Text
You should the search term in your webpage as often as you can without distracting its readability. It is important you write for Google and as well as your readers. Make sure to include the search term at the start of the text.
g-Alt Text
<img src=”url” alt=”some alt text which is displayed on mouse over”>
Include search term or the keyword in all the alt text of the image. Make sure its related to the image and makes sense.
Negative On Page SEO:
These are the techniques that people generally in an effort to fool Google, I recommend never ever do it. It results in rank drop and can even be banned by the Google search engines for life
a-Avoid using hidden and invisible text. People tend to write the search terms many time in white with a white webpage background making it hidden from the surfer and not from the Google crawler. This is frowned upon by the people and leads to penalization from search engines.
b-Avoid Cloaking or Redirects. Cloaking refers to serving two types of web pages depending upon who is visiting it. If it is a regular surfer one page shows up and if it is a search engine crawler it shows up another page. Another page being stuffed with search terms making no sense to humans. Again it is not at all recommended in any circumstances.
c-Avoid duplicate content. Duplicate content means you create one web site, with content on topic a, and then repeat the content over and over again on multiple websites. In theory you could create one website, achieve high ranking on it, and then clog up the search engines with the same content duplicated on multiple domains. Again this is not recommended and should be avoided.
The negative On Page SEO techniques may work for a short while that too if you are extremely lucky but eventually you will end up being penalized or banned by the search engines.
Make sure to follow all the elements strictly and i am sure you will benefit from it.
I guess you got a general idea how the On Page SEO works. The next Post will include the Off Page SEO make sure to subscribe to the blog to get notified as soon as I post it.
John Chow Publicly Humiliates Dan Waggoner
John Chow very well know blogger known publicly humiliates Dan Waggoner.
John Chow
Recently in his email of the week blog post he copied an email sent to him by Dan Waggoner where Dan asked for a “Big Time Favour” by endorsing his new ebook. Dan even asked John to become his affiliate and to keep the cut..:) You dont do that when u ask for a favour..
Anyway Dan also wrote he is new to affiliate marketing so he really needed this favour bigtime! Wonder what kinda book would that have been written by a newbie
BUT the worst part is that John released that email in the public domain WITHOUT changing the senders REAL NAME and the word spread like fire..lol
People tracked Dan Waggoner down and now we all know who is he..Just an online marketer tryin hard to succeed or to take his success to next level.
Dan Waggoner
So..why the hell did John Chow do it? I mean what good did it do to John anyway apart from living upto his bad guy reputation and creating some controversy and buzz around..
I feel sorry for Dan ..but who said that world is good..Dan learned his lesson the hard way
Guess what…Dan is anyhow getting all the publicity he wanted..hmmm! you think about it
How To Choose A Domain Name
The first step you need to do when you decide to start a website or a blog Choosing a domain name.
Most of the people who start an online business make mistake in there very first step, choosing a domain name.Its a bad start! During my early years I committed this mistake so many times untill i got an idea on how to go about it.
So how to choose a domain name?
How To Choose A DOmain Name
Decide an extension .COM, .NET, .ORG , .info or Country Specific extensions like .US, .UK, .IN
If you think you will be catering local audience it makes much sense for taking country specific domain names.
If you have a worldwide audience like in a make money online niche the first choice would be to take first generation
domain names
Ist Choice: “.COM”
2nd Choice: “.Net”
3rd Choice: “.org”
Avoid .info domains as they are 2nd generation domains and are not ranked well by google. Taking .info domains makes sense if you are not planning to do some seo and get traffic from google search engines. I do not recommend them though.
Choosing proper extension is very important for your blog or website NEVER EVER MAKE MISTAKE HERE!!
Long Or Short Domain Name?
Well, this is debatable! Single word domain names are hard to find unless you create a new word..like your company name or your own name.
A good domain name can dramatically improve your Click Through Rate. For Example lets consider three domain names:
MakeMoney.com
MakeMoneyOnline.com
MakeMoneyOnlineFromHome.com
The first one tells us how to make money while the 2nd domain is more specific and tells more about the content of the website. While the third domain is little more specific but its little too long to remember ..so you have to strike a balance between the length of the domain name and its specificity…good luck with that
“Never Use abbreviation for your domain names”
Domain Name & SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
The idea is to have the main keyword you are targeting in your domain name but without compromising the sense of the domain and making sure domain name does not look too awkard.
Lets your main keyword is “Make Money Using Google” you can have a domain name like googlemoney.com
Try to avoid characters like “-” or “-” in the domain name as they are hard to remember and difficult to tell!
Your Name as Your Domain Name:
That is totally your choice..generally makes sense when you are trying to brand yourself. For example you are selling information that is unique to you or coach people in a niche like make money online..branding yourself can be a good idea! JohnChow.com
Or if you want to create a personal blog, blogging about your daily routine and stuff..go for your name as your domain name!
I guess this is it about choosing a domain name.
Kindly comment and let me know if I have missed any point.
Welcome To FiveStarAffiliate.com
Hello readers!
I am starting this blog with just one goal in mind, to teach people how to make money online. My name is Rahil and i am 25 years old, a medicine graduate but work online part time. I’ve been in online marketing since past 3 years now.
I have learned a lot and made few bucks as well, but the fact that 95% of the people who look up for keyword “make money online” on internet have no clue where to start and what to do. The bigger problem is they are misdirected by many sites and misinformed and end up being scammed or working in a wrong direction.
Since i have been doing it for quite a sometime now i am starting this blog where i will be teaching beginners how to make money online. I’ll be teaching few basic skills like how to start a website, how to promote an affiliate product, how to build up traffic to your website and how to work part time and work towards your goal so that you are in a position to make your first buck and later on much more.
Making Money Online is not easy. PERIOD. There is nothing like getting rick quick overnight. It requires patience, right method and the most important being CONSISTENT.
I’ll be telling beginners few basic HTML skills and few methods on how to make your Blog/Website up and running in few days. Its easy!!
The Aim Of FiveStarAffiliate:
1- Teach People How to Make MOney ONline
2- How To Make Money Selling Other People’s Stuff (Affiliate Marketing)
3- How To Bring Visitors To Your Website (Building Traffic)
4- Reviewing New Affiliate Programs & Websites
6- Monetizing Your Blog (For People Who Already Have Blog But Dont Know How to Make Money With It)
I know 90% of my readers will be beginners or just information seekers i’ll keep that in mind and will write my posts in simple language (not too techie), will also try to make sure to draw a basic outline for beginners on how to go about it.
Also dont worry geeks!! u’ll find many High End Stuff HERE as well..
