I have documentation and skype recordings that verify 100% of what is claimed here. I’ve tried to be as fact-based and objective as I can possibly be.

Long story short, I had a very simple situation turn into a big stinking mess because of the misinformation provided to me by one of the AMs at AKMG, Eleah.  Now this girl, Eleah, is extremely nice, but she’s a grunt at the company and has no real voice.  That’s where the problem for me lies. She tells me one thing, I act on that information and incur expenses, then her boss tells me another thing, and asks me to abandon the previous design work and do something new. (Update: In fairness, they did offer to have their in house people edit the sites, but this was only offered after we had gone round after round with me telling them I was done with the offer.)

I initially agreed to run this Oriel wine offer. It’s a weak offer with a low payout, but it’s wide open, barely any competition, so I said I’ll give it a shot.  I spend 30+ hours doing some hardcore research so when I do launch the offer, I have a decent chance of at least making ’something’.

After all the research, I hire a designer who does a design for me. I submit it to AKMG for approval and Eleah comes back with “approved as long as the remaining copy to be completed in the website does not in any way allude to or insinuate that you are part of Oriel Wine.”  The domains I submitted were also approved.

The design used all of Oriel’s provided graphics and the color scheme was closely tied in to their site. It was not a knock off and anyone with 1/2 a brain knew from reading the flog copy that it was for sure NOT Oriel Wine.

Fast forward to the day I start traffic, 2 hours in they have issues with the design and the domain(s) I’m using.

I stop traffic, they come back with some weak excuse that “the Oriel marketing guy approved your design, but the Oriel CEO did not, it’s too similar to their own site”. I explain to her that that info might have been useful a lot earlier in the process and that now I’m already $400 into designs (3 designs for 4 sites) and I wasn’t about to spend another $300 to have them updated.  On this day, AKMG wouldn’t provide me any further feedback detailing what exactly would make the lander compliant or what the merchant really wanted.  They just said “something else, a review site”.  They knew my plans (I have emails with Eleah) long before this and plans included flogs.

Long story short, I got pissed and said since you approved the design, let it run, or reimburse me design expenses.  I asked for a paltry $510 to cover the design fees (and domains) for the designs they approved and I can’t use now. They declined to let it run and later said (I have this recorded!) that they don’t feel they are responsible for the design fees even though they gave the approval. [UPDATE: At the point where I asked for approval, I had only spend $50 on the design.  The other expenses were having it coded as a wordpress theme and modified for Thesis.  The look/feel of the design did not change whatsoever, only difference was it went from Photoshop to a fully coded WP Thesis theme. The decision to have it coded up came AFTER Eleah approved the design.  Had she said the design wasn't approved, no biggie, eat the $50 and start from scratch using Eleah's feedback.  Since she approved the design and I moved forward, I felt that they should comp me for the additional expenses. This is no different than an AM telling you it's ok to run PPV and 2 months later, the merchant says it's not ok and wants to withhold 2 months of commissions... The network has a responsibility to cover it's mistake in both my situation and the PPV example.]

Before anyone starts down the “the merchant has the right…” path, let’s be clear that I agree 100% with what AKMG is saying  when they now communicate their merchant’s intentions. The problem is they communicated something totally different a lot earlier in this process and it ended up costing me.

I’m sure guys run with AKMG fine all the time, but if you’re new and looking for a quality network, AKMG sucks…

The real victim here is Oriel Wines.  I have the domains and the designs and the research and I’m going to push the heck out of these other offers, bumping out all the top Oriel SERPs.

UPDATE: I’m surprised I forgot to write what I was most angry about. My feelings were that if the merchant was pulling this indecisive crap this early in the relationship, I was concerned with the possibility they’d pull this sort of reversal later on, once they had $5K-10K in commissions payable to me. This is why I told AKMG that I was done with the offer and I didn’t trust the merchant or their NOOB internal staff.  I wasn’t gonna waste my time arguing with Oriel about keywords they didn’t have on their list, or approved keywords they later reconsidered, etc., and that’s EXACTLY where the situation would have landed had I ran traffic with AKMG.  It’s a network’s job to deal with the biz end of the merchant>network>affiliate relationship and I cannot see how AKMG could have failed more completely.

Take my Wordpress Review Plugin, WFReview, for example.  I wanted to make sure that I knew of any and all negative reviews of the product, or complaints even, and I wanted to know as soon as possible after the content showed up.  I went to www.google.com/alerts and setup a few alerts that would notify me if my name, product name, business name, product misspellings, etc., ever showed up on a blog that Google recently indexed or found the RSS feed to.

Sure enough, a few days into the launch of WFreview version 1.0, I received some google alerts that hit on my product name.  Thankfully, the alerts notified me of blogs that absolutely LOVED the product and were singing it’s praises from the mountain tops.

The real lesson here is you need to be proactive with your reputation.  Everyone takes a beating sometimes, even if it’s totally wrong and unfair.    Start by monitoring the easy stuff, your brand names, your business names, employee names, product names, COMPETITORS keywords, and anything else unique to your industry.  This way, you get a TON of email that tells you 2 things:

1. The trends in your industry as they apply to you.  If someone is talking about your product as it relates to your competitor, that’s a good thing.  Offer to sponsor the blog or post even. Get your banner right up next to the content, even if it’s neutral.  People will recognize your brand and will be more likely to click through to your site.
2. What others are writing about.  Odds are if someone with a huge following is writing about your product, you can guarantee you’ll see some traffic from the post. Take the effort to contact the author to correct any misinformation or give MORE information.  Giving them a very generous affiliate commission on your products is another surefire way to keep your name in thier posts.

Follow some others too, http://search.twitter.com is an excellent resource to find out what people say about you.  Check it often and be sure to use misspellings of your keywords/products.

If a social media platform has an API, odds are great that you’ll be able to integrate a scheduled search function in your own reputation management system, which I’m sure you’ll be building after you do a few Google alerts and mentions of your business and products start rolling in…