Hey gang, I'm back with another interesting article. As I've said in a previous post, I am an EzineArticles.com published author. Well I've written another article for them and it's currently posted on the front page. For sake of ease, though (and to keep you reading here of course), I will repost the article for you. Feel free to use it on your own website either from this post or from the actual Ezine Articles post. It is released with your right to freely use it so long as you do not modify it in any way and keep all of the copyright information intact. In other words, link to it, quote from it, but kindly keep my credit. However if you want to use it to give your own marketing website content, by all means go ahead. Once again, keep my links and copyright protection intact. That is all I ask. I actually prefer you link to the Ezine Articles post instead of this one, but it's entirely up to you. For your ease, here is a direct link to the article on EzineArticles.com . Also if you would like to read all three of the articles that I have posted there, you can reach my profile by clicking here .

Once again, here is the article in it's entirety:

 In case you haven’t heard, AWeber has banned the usage of Viral Friend Generator and any other Tell-A-Friend (commonly referred to as TAF) scripts. So what does this mean to us as affiliate marketers? It means that anyone who bought Viral Friend Generator since its new launch risks having their AWeber account pulled for violating their anti-spam policies.

Tom Kulzer, CEO of AWeber.com has this to say on the matter:

“TAF forms in nearly all instances work the same way. A website visitor sees your TAF form and types in 1-3 different "friend’s" email addresses. The website itself uses a script or some other backend program to physically send those emails on the visitors behalf to the "friends" that have been entered. Those emails are physically sent from the website owners machine and not the friend themselves.”

Basically AWeber’s stance on the idea of TAF scripts is that they are spam. Their reasoning behind it is that because the email is originating from the offending website’s server and not from the actual person’s email servers, it is unsolicited. And as you well know, sending unsolicited email is a dangerous business and could even be against the law.

Tom went on further to say that because there is no way of authenticating whether or not the person filling out the TAF form is an actual friend of the recipient, it is too easy to exploit a TAF form for email spamming purposes. Because of this, AWeber will not allow anyone who utilizes their services to use TAF scripts on their website. Instead, he suggests using alternative means such as including something in your newsletters encouraging current subscribers of your mailing list to pass your newsletters on to their friends and to also include instructions on how non-members can sign up. In fact he even gives a small snippet as an example of what to add to your mailings:

“Thanks for reading! If you know someone who could benefit from this, feel free to forward it to them! Not a subscriber yet? Like what you’ve read? Sign up to get future issues delivered straight to you: http://www.example.com Until next time!”

The concept of whether or not TAF scripts are spam is still up for debate, but AWeber’s stance is very clear – if you use their services, you cannot use TAF scripts at all. They are standing strong on this one and even go so far as to say to their customers:

“You don’t have to agree with our position on TAF. But we do expect you to respect it, as we respect your opinion. If you feel that TAF is a necessary element to your marketing, that’s fine, and your decision to make. Just understand that it’s not at all something that can be done with AWeber, so you need to seek out another email solution if you’re going to use TAF.”

All is not lost, however, as AWeber is not the only autoresponder company in town. As a matter of fact, the very creator of Viral Friend Generator, Mike Filsaime, has his own autoresponder service called ProSender. And I’m sure he’s not going to ban you from using his own product.

Comments (1) | Quote this article on your site | Read more...