By: GotCredit
As ridiculous as it sounds, I have indeed lost my credit card affiliate links
Not that they made any difference anyway – I maybe pulled a few commissions in the course of several months. Thank you so much to those of you who supported me on the blog, by the way.
I only had a few credit card affiliate links on my resource pages, and I’ve never inserted them into the posts or pushed them in any other way. For one thing, they weren’t major links, anyway, and, besides, I have a tremendous creative difficulty crafting posts around affiliate links. Somehow, it feels, I don’t know – wrong?
Despite the lack of major credit card links from this affiliate I was happy about working with them because they never pushed me to sell. There were no quotas, no pressure, and I could choose only the links with the best bonuses that I felt comfortable to offer to my readers. I always disclosed which credit card links were affiliate links, and which were not, despite the fact that they were for the best respective bonuses anyway. As many of you might know, I passionately believe in the blogger’s right to make money, but I also believe in disclaimers and putting the reader first.
That all stopped when the affiliate company sent me a demand to remove the disclaimer. I told them politely that I wouldn’t be able to and explained why. The reply I received was extraordinarily rude. It advised me (again, in a very rude form) that they were severing our relationship.
Now, please understand this – the guy I was dealing with is one of the nicest and most polite people I’ve ever met. I was stunned – not by the termination of our agreement – but by the way it was announced. It was pretty much when I realized what enormous pressure banks apply to the affiliate companies they are working with.
To his credit, he sent me a few more emails where he apologized for the outburst and offered some insights (although not without stinging me for not having better traffic).
“We were not against you having a disclaimer. We disapprove the way how your disclaimer was written because such disclaimer does not follow the compliance policies of many card issuers.
“…the way how you wrote the disclaimer was a huge compliance risk.
“If your disclaimer stated that you received commission from advertisers and/or you link to our home page or travel-card page, it would be completely acceptable. But the disclaimer that you had was not acceptable by some banks.”
Quite honestly, I don’t understand why disclosing a financial relationship would be a “compliance risk” to a bank, while saying that you might have a financial relationship with a bank wouldn’t. But in any case, this vague and, sadly, typical disclosure wouldn’t work for me at all. I only had from 4 to 7 credit card affiliate links on my credit card resource pages. In the meantime, I list dozens of unaffiliated credit card links with the best bonuses, and I don’t want the readers to think that all or most of them earn me commissions (because it’s not true).
Maybe when (or rather if) I get off my ass and finally monetize this blog somehow, I’ll also get to concoct this generic, inane, and insulting, even to the least intelligent life form, disclaimer about how I “may receive compensation etc., etc.,” but from where I’m standing right now it just doesn’t make sense.
Farewell, my lovelies. Back to square one!
