Affiliate Marketers Banned From Wordpress.com
We have read several reports recently about Wordpress.com suspending blogs that are used for affiliate marketing purposes. Please know that this does NOT affect the majority of Wordpress.org users; only those who host on Wordpress.com are being affected. For those not familiar, Wordpress.com offers free hosting to Bloggers, but there are some restrictions and limitations, one of which being they discourage the use of the service for sites that make substantial use of affiliate marketing offers and links.
While it seems unlikely that many serious affiliate marketers would be using Wordpress.com anyway, it’s worth noting that they discourage using it heavily for affiliate marketing offers. You can sign up for free hosting or very cheap hosting with so many providers these days that using wordpress.com is really only for Bloggers with little or no technical skills.
If you are running WPMarketer or want to use it soon you really want to register your own domain names and get an inexpensive hosting provider so that you can use the Wordpress CMS to do whatever you want with your blog, including monetization with Google Adsense, affiliate offers and direct advertising. You can sign up with services such as qoozz.com for shared server hosting starting at about $8 per month. You also have the advantage of building your own brand and domain authority over time by registering a domain name and setting your site up on a shared server instead of spending time and energy building your site on the wordpress.com domain name.
When shopping for a hosting service, be sure to look for one that offers the WHM and CPANEL tools and that runs PHP 5.x since many of the advanced plugins for Wordpress do not run on PHP 4 or lower. Also, it seems that Wordpress 2.7 may be the last major release that will run on PHP 4, which has not actively been developed since December 11th, 2007 and is end of life anyway.
Affililate marketers using Wordpress may want to prepare for future releases and advanced plugins such as WPMarketer now by checking their server for PHP version 5 or higher. If yours is still on PHP 4 or lower, request that they upgrade to PHP 5.x or consider switching providers!
Wordpress.com has not banned any marketers as far as I know, and I am hooked up there. I have sent in a request for information to Kevin, and he has assured me this is not the case.
Can you tell us specifically which blogs this was?
Thanks guys.
PS: I am on Wordpress Affiliate Pro. How does your software compare, and should I consider switching? This is an important question, as I will be mailing my readership shortly with my recommendation, and so far WP Affiliate Pro has it.
Please advise.
Ron
Hi Ron,
The report of wordpress.com blogs being banned came from the source linked to in this post; if this can be confirmed as not true please let us know as we do not host any sites with wordpress.com and cannot verify their policy on pure affiliate marketing sites. We are only looking at what others have reported on this topic but in general using wordpress.com to host affiliate marketing sites is probably not a great idea anyway.
Also, if you use Wordpress to do affiliate marketing I don’t think you’d have the option to run a plugin such as WPMarketer or WP Affiliate Pro. If anybody has tried this I’d love to know whether its even possible.
You can see our comparison of WPMarketer with the competitors, including WP Affiliate Pro here on our blog. We think WPMarketer is superior in terms of features and certainly since we offer it free under GPL, a huge advantage you and your readers will get by using it is not having to pay $97. WP Affiliate Pro does not support Google Adwords Conversion tracking and also does not support image and JavaScript ad types, both of which are features WPMarketer already supports.
Since we first released WPMarketer in early December we have updated it 3 times already and will continue to release new features and bug fixes regularly. I do not know whether WP Affiliate Pro has even been updated for Wordpress 2.7 yet.
Our only disadvantage may be the fact that we have announced today that WPMarketer will only run on servers with PHP 5.0 or higher; a decision we have made in order to provide functionality we can not support on PHP 4.x servers unfortunately.
Regards,
Steve
Greetings. Thanks for the plugin. I’m going to play with it a bit. The Free WP-Affiliate plugin brings my blog down when I activate it. I found yours with a google search for “wordpress google tracking”. Thanks.
BTW, One of my websites was banned from wordpress.com. I don’t host there, I only use the API key to track my stats and Askimet spam. I think I made an error by registering 2 sites with the same username/password. Any thoughts on getting back in the good books. My wordpress.com account says suspended.
Cheers
Brian
my wordpress.com blog was also banned finanznews.wordpress.com
Thank you for the great plugin
Thanks for the great information. Wish you great 2009.
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I’ve just got banned from wordpress for this reason. I didn’t even see anything in the TOS about affiliate marketing and still can’t, but thats what they told me when I emailed them. I was only using wordpress for this affiliate stuff because it was recommended. I can’t beleive they don’t allow it, its disgraceful. I hope blogger is different. I’ve spend ages working on my blogs and it was just a waste of time!! I hate wordpress now. Everyone should know about this before they join