FTC Guidelines and Clickbank Affiliates

There's been a lot of talk about the FTC guidelines and testimonials. It's my understanding that an infoproduct publisher is equally liable if one of his or her affiliates is brought under scrutiny for claims made in a presell message, such as a blog post.

So in other words, if you're selling a make money book, and modify your sales page to be in compliance, and there are affiliates out there, anywhere, singing your praises about how they made a bazillion dollars by following your system, they and you both could be fined.

Now, it's easy to say that you need to have some control and agreement and communication with your affiliates, but in the case of Clickbank products, that's not possible, is it? There's no way of knowing who's promoting your product.

But what about the fact that Clickbank is actually a reseller, and the customer actually is purchasing from Clickbank. Does that change things?

Sure, Clickbank can go back and do a review of all sales pages and make sure they come into compliance, or remove them from sale, but there's another problem. Many affiliates are bypassing the publisher's sales page, and linking straight to the CB order form, from their own version of a sales page.

So if I have a product, and there are some problem testimonials, which I fix before December 1st, but an unknown affiliate is using his version of the page with bad testimonials, am I going to be called into question?

I have a major issue with that, actually. A year or so a well known marketer had a membership site where he supplied rewritten sales pages of CB products, supposedly they would convert better. My product was one of the ones he rewrote, and he distributed it to all his members at the time. He didn't ask my permission to rewrite my sales page, he didn't need to get Clickbank approval (like I did when I submitted it), and I wasn't aware of it until I saw extra traffic coming from sales pages that weren't mine, but I was still getting credit for the sale (I only saw the traffic because I had statcounter code in my original page and he didn't bother to remove the javascript).

The rewritten sales pages still had my name and signature on them, even though I didn't write them. Am I screwed if the FTC comes calling about a sales page I didn't write, that has my name on it?

Bottom line is, if Clickbank is deemed to be the seller of all the infoproducts in its inventory, and liable for the testimonials and claims on all those sales pages, it could get pretty messy indeed.