Aweber is Rejecting Traffic Exchanges

Well this is an interesting tidbit. Apparently Aweber is sending emails to traffic exchange owners saying to cease and desist:

Our logs indicate that you have configured an automatic traffic generating service to direct visitors to your AWeber affiliate link. Unfortunately, these services generally only send untargeted, massively large quantities of traffic that generate nothing more than extra load on our web servers and additional costs. Please see that your affiliate link is disconnected from this traffic generating service immediately.

It’s coming up in various places and people are looking to Tom Kulzer for answers. So far nothing has happened by trying to talk to the support reps in Live Chat. Until the word is out, here is my take.

Don’t use referral links in traffic exchanges! I know I know, it’s hard to make a splash page right? Wrong. You get better results AND you don’t send all this traffic to a service who isn’t prepared to get that traffic. Really I can understand their point of view. Their affiliate links are probably getting pounded with traffic, and realistically advertising a service in that way isn’t going to get much results.

I’ve decided to ban Aweber to protect myself and my members. This means you can’t stick their referral links in rotation at StartXchange. Now if you want to advertise it, do so with a splash page or when you send out an email to your list. I have the buttons on my blog, and recommend it perodically too.

So then what’s the big deal? Well the deal is Aweber sent out these emails to owners who are trying to teach their members how to use Aweber correctly. So they aren’t happy about getting this punishment.

What will be the result? This is still unsure. It depends on how Tom reacts. If I were him I’d do a few things.. 1) Send an email to the owners and apologize for the misunderstanding 2) Explain the problem about too much traffic and 3) Insert a frame breaking code on the affiliate page and ask to be banned.

I really think something along those lines will happen as Aweber is widely popular for a reason. I think a mix up happened and the wrong people got punished. What do you think about it?