Amazon just rejected my account

[olasz]

Hi

So I've been promoting Amazon products for a couple of weeks now. A few days ago I made my first sales (about $40 at least, probably more). But 1 day later I got an email from Amazon that they rejected my application. To be clear they let me promote their stuff for a couple of weeks beforehand. Here is the mail I got from them:

Thank you for applying for the Associate program. Upon review, we are unable to accept your application. A part of our criteria is that your site has to be established with enough unique content. We rejected your application due to one or more of the following reasons.

- Lack of content which is original and beneficial to your visitors
- Pages that are mainly empty when advertisement content is removed websites containing mostly images, videos, or Flash animations will not be approved

My site has 8 products (some books) listed (2 ClickBank, 6 Amazon) with individual reviews. Each review is about 200-250 words long with 2-3-4 images of the product. The site is not Wordpress, but generally looks great.

Here are a couple of things I did:

• I did spam my Amazon affiliate links as blog post comments on 30+ blog posts (the "amzn to" shortened version).
• I did advertise on Facebook for 1 day (on the *same* day I got rejected), my ad link was an instant HTTP redirect to my amzn to link which obviously went straight to the advertised product (so it skipped any site)
• I did copy and paste about 50% of the reviews from the many 5* Amazon reviews of the products.
• I did NOT display prices

Note: the product I spammed on blogs and advertized on FB was 100% unrelated to the website (it was a tablet pc) I registered my associate account with. Is this a bad thing?

So my question is, which of these (maybe all?) could be the reason which earned the deletion of my account? Their email is kind of vague.

If any1 can provide some insight, that would be great. Please note that this was my first attempt at IM so.. yeah.. maybe I should read their ToS more closely.

Thanks
Akos

 

[ComputerJunkie]

your blog isn't to their standards unfortunately.

 

[sassafras]

I think the biggest thing was your site's content. They want lots of unique content and you had short, 50% duplicated content and too many images.

 

[peetrike]

Oh boy, you just named what you did wrong. Even if you use amzn.to it still leaves referer. Also spamming in social sites and blog comments is big NO (unless you know how to fake the referer). It`s so easy to get accepted to amazon. Just create new site with some articles (20+ and can be scraped), add links and few other important things. Send some traffic and you get accepted. Also don`t post your aff links to random places without faking the referer.

Cheers

 

[Elbert Jones]

I suppose your content wasn't acceptable

 

[olasz]

Oh boy, you just named what you did wrong. Even if you use amzn.to it still leaves referer. Also spamming in social sites and blog comments is big NO (unless you know how to fake the referer). It`s so easy to get accepted to amazon. Just create new site with some articles (20+ and can be scraped), add links and few other important things. Send some traffic and you get accepted. Also don`t post your aff links to random places without faking the referer.

Cheers

Thanks, that's exactly why I wrote down everything I did. I don't know what's OK and what's not.

One more question about acceptable content: can I copy-pasta it (like I did with the reviews)? I mean the site isn't meant to go very far in terms of organic traffic (in other words I'm not really trying to rank it in google).

So far what's wrong:
- too little/low quality site content
- no spamming of affiliate links

I forgot to mention, the facebook ad was also cancelled by Facebook. The reason seems to be that I used about 50% of the ad image for some text (only 5 words, but in big font size). So many rules.. But I guess it's for the sake of better user experience.

Any more issues? Let this be a what-not-to-do reference for future noobs like me.

 

[peetrike]

Thanks, that's exactly why I wrote down everything I did. I don't know what's OK and what's not.

One more question about acceptable content: can I copy-pasta it (like I did with the reviews)? I mean the site isn't meant to go very far in terms of organic traffic (in other words I'm not really trying to rank it in google).

So far what's wrong:
- too little/low quality site content
- no spamming of affiliate links

I forgot to mention, the facebook ad was also cancelled by Facebook. The reason seems to be that I used about 50% of the ad image for some text (only 5 words, but in big font size). So many rules.. But I guess it's for the sake of better user experience.

Any more issues? Let this be a what-not-to-do reference for future noobs like me.

Just create a site specially for amazon affiliates. Get a domain, nice looking theme (some magazine theme for example). Then scrape some content (20+), add amazon affiliate links and their policy (This website is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com) and start sending traffic. Also about FB ads. You can send the traffic only to your site and optimize it to get high CTR to amazon (unless you know how to cloak and fake the referer).

Cheers

 

[safex]

It depend How Old was your account applied. and what was Source of Traffic for that Sale, and where you from. Read that Indian and few Asians Country not getting accounts approval easily.

 

[mar0ka]

add amazon affiliate policy (This website is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com)

How important is this?
Also where do we insert this? we create a privacy policy tab or???

 

[FBGuru]

Spamming your affiliate links on blog posts is the easiest way to get your account banned. I've seen several comments like that in the past and none of them continue maybe they got their account banned too. I'm not sure how strict is Amazon when compared to Adsense but you can try adding more legit reviews to your site and try again.

 

[olasz]

Spamming your affiliate links on blog posts is the easiest way to get your account banned. I've seen several comments like that in the past and none of them continue maybe they got their account banned too. I'm not sure how strict is Amazon when compared to Adsense but you can try adding more legit reviews to your site and try again.

Makes sense. I saw ppl do it too though I didn't check out their link.

What about FB ads? I made it so that the link I gave FB to advertise will immediately redirect to Amazon (HTTP redirect header). Is this considered bad?

Also, when I created the FB ad I clicked that I let FB optimize my bid. The maximum bid FB suggested was like $0.3 .. $0.5, but FB eventually bid over $1.0 / click ... This is so confusing

 

[peetrike]

Makes sense. I saw ppl do it too though I didn't check out their link.

What about FB ads? I made it so that the link I gave FB to advertise will immediately redirect to Amazon (HTTP redirect header). Is this considered bad?

Also, when I created the FB ad I clicked that I let FB optimize my bid. The maximum bid FB suggested was like $0.3 .. $0.5, but FB eventually bid over $1.0 / click ... This is so confusing

It allowed to post your Amazon urls (if you sell on Amazon and aren`t affiliate) to random blogs and anywhere else but it`s not allowed to post your affiliate links.
About FB ads - yes it`s bad, read Amazon`s ToS.

Cheers

 

[iMakeRacks]

I had the same issue, made ~300$ and then before paying me they decide I'm not good enough? With conversions like that, I doubt it. Fuck amazon