What To Do When You Get Slapped?

What the heck is a slap anyways?  What does it mean as an affiliate when you get slapped?  Is there anything you can do to recover from a slap quickly?  Today, we’ll discuss all these things and more, so hold on as we talk about getting slapped!  I promise it won’t hurt too bad!

So what exactly is a slap?  What does getting slapped mean in terms of affiliate marketing?  My definition is simply this…

A Slap (in affiliate marketing) is when the company that you are using to send you traffic decides that what you are promoting is no longer acceptable or they feel that you aren’t holding up to the standards they have in place for the niche you’re running!

Most of you have probably heard of a Google Slap before, but in reality, a slap can come from any network that you are using to drive traffic to your site, whether it’s a PPC, PPV, Content, or Social Media type of network!

So what are some examples of reasons that people’s accounts get slapped that they are using to drive traffic to their affiliate sites?

One of the biggest reasons I see affiliates get slapped for is because their sites are crap!  90% of the time when someone asks me to look at their stuff and tell them why their stuff was slapped in Google or Yahoo it’s because their site is a piece of crap that was built to make a quick buck!  I’m not saying these sites can’t work anymore, but you need to realize that slowly but surely these sites are becoming a lot harder to keep up for any serious length of time!

So what do I mean by a piece of crap affiliate site?  Well for starters, I still see affiliates trying to make single page landing pages that don’t have privacy policy, terms of service, or other links that most networks require!  They don’t have any information on their site besides the page they are trying to sell the person on.  Most of these networks now want to see effort put into the site to provide real 100% authentic value to users!

The second biggest reason I see is because these networks start to slap certain niches.  These slaps are a little more general and don’t typically follow any particular pattern, although if you keep up with news happening in affiliate marketing you can normally tell when a niche is about to get hit by the FTC which in terms normally means some changes with the networks.

An example of this would be the Acai Berry Diet blogs that started getting slapped a couple months ago (facebook even banned them completely) to the more recent niche going through this, which is, government grants and the use of Obama and Government Stimulus!

So now that we know what a slap is and some examples of why you may get slapped, the next obvious question to answer is, “So how do I avoid a slap?”

The answer to that question really isn’t that hard, there are only a few major things that you need to focus on to make sure that you are doing everything you can to avoid a slap!

• Make sure you provide high quality, relevant content about your niche on your site.
• Make sure your ad groups are “laser targeted” meaning that your ads and keywords are broken down into groups where they are relevant to each other!
• Make sure your landing page is relevant to your ads and keywords as well.

Again, it’s really not that difficult, as you can see the two major things here is Content and Relevance!

Okay, so you’ve already been slapped before reading this, so now you know you need to get up some great content and you need to make sure everything is relevant and laser targeted, however, what do you do till then?

There isn’t much you can do, however, there are a couple quick fixes.  They are listed below in no particular order, so you’ll just have to try them all till you find one that works for your situation.

• Delete all your ads and then reupload them if only your ads got deactivated (common in Yahoo)
• Delete your entire campaign and reupload it back with a different campaign name
• Call and ask if there is anything they can do to get you back up and running (I know crazy right???)
• Create a new account and upload your campaign into the new account (if you got account slapped)
• Create a new account and upload your campaign, however, use a new domain name (if your domain got banned)

Those are some of the common quick fixes you can use to get your campaign back up and making money while you figure out a slap and fix the problem.

If you have any other tips of things that work to get past a slap, post them in the comments!

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