Leave a blog for a few days, and thousands of interesting stories pass by. One of the most interesting throughout the past week must have been the hoo-hah over Joel Comm’s upcoming “Made for AdSense” programme, i.e. Instant AdSense Templates.

If you want some background on the issue, I suggest reading the extended coverage by Duncan Riley here, here and here (in chronological order) or jumping to Jamsi’s summary post over at WorkBoxers. This is definitely one of those “stories” where the resulting comment “wars” light up your day with fun and laughter (not unlike the 9rules saga many months back).

In my opinion, there’s a lot of unanswered questions on both sides of the issue, so like Jamsi, I’ll not take a hard stand. Instead, I’d like to point out a few simple lessons I learnt from this MFA saga:

1. Affiliate Marketing From The Pros
   If you explore the various screenshots, beginners to affiliate marketing (like me) can learn a hell lot about how the pros do their business. One good example is the soliciting of testimonials. I’ve always wondered how sales pages always contained tons of real testimonials, with linkback to a proper site - even though the product being sold has only been out for a week. Now I know all you need to do is to get them to opt-in for your “limited testimonial slots” during your previews.
2. Don’t Send Preview Invites Too Early
   This is more of a personal opinion than anything else, but most of the “flaming” so far have concerned Duncan’s act of screenshoting “password-protected previews”. But if you allow people entry to your preview, and do not place any copyright messages or restrictions (just my assumption from the comments so far), then you’re going to have to expect early “discussion” of your content. I’m not even going into the “first ammendment protection” bloggers are supposed to have in the wake of the recent Apple case yet.
3. Even Cursory Associations Can Kill
   In the wake of this fiasco, some prominent bloggers have been brought into the picture as a result of their relationships with Joel Comm, prior or current. For example, the whole problem started with Yaro’s promotion of Joel Comm’s free AdSense e-Book - where there were some connotations of his endorsement of Joel’s Instant AdSense Templates as well. Later, a reader pointed out Darren Rowse’s review of Joel Comm’s popular AdSense e-Book, which Duncan Riley did not “flame” as much as the AdSense Templates - highlighting perhaps some measure of hypocrisy. All this just goes to show that any links you might have with anybody can hurt you, especially on the web where associations can be found with a single Google search. This perhaps implies a need to conduct in-depth and continuous research before beginning any sort of “endorsement” relationship (which is actually rather ridiculous to expect anyone to do, of course).

Yep, that’s it. Let’s not dwell on this too much.

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