The Micro Affiliate

Well, its been a long time between posts. A few things in my personal life took up a lot of my time so I decided to cut back work related activities down to the essentials, which doesn’t include blogging, so I put it on the back burner for a while. So, after moving house, being in hospital for surgery, with a bit of recovery time at home after, and a relationship break-up I’ve been trying to throw myself back into the work full force. Its astounding how much emotional energy breaking up can suck up, making it hard to focus on other things. And it has a way of dragging on. In other fun and exciting news, another astoundingly time consuming and draining activity is doing your annual tax return, which in Australia is technically due in October, but you can always get an extension. Feels like I’ve spent days going through all my bank accounts and credit cards and going through receipts and endless paperwork to pass on to my accountant. Oh wait, I have spent [i]days[/i] on it, fer real. I feel pity for my accountant, as he’s the one who’ll actually have to do the numbers. I’m about to fax him the last of the bank statements and email the last of the spreadsheets, so its all out of my hands. One final hiccup – I’m in court for DUI (PCA in Australia) on Tuesday for another bashing around the head for a stint indulging my stupidity. Hey, we’re rockin’n'rollin with the best here and wear our scars with pride! And learn our lessons slowly.

So now onto the good news!

Got one of these in my email today:

Dear advertiser,

We are writing to let you know that your Google AdWords account has been disabled due to one or more serious violations of our advertising policies related to Landing Page and Site Quality. As a result, your ads will no longer run through the Google AdWords system and we are unable to accept advertising from you in the future. Please note that future accounts you open will also be disabled.

What ghastly things have I done to deserve this tragic fate? Well, the ONLY campaigns I EVER ran in that account were for 2 Amazon affiliate stores that I had written about earlier. One of those I had bought and know that the previous owner ran Adwords campaigns for (hey, I knew why he was getting rid of it and knew what I was buying, as I explained before) and the other is one that I made myself. I only ran the campaigns for a short time before they got ‘google slapped’, but I was going to turn them off anyway, as they were not profitable and I was doing better with organic traffic.

A google slap for a thin affiliate site I can understand. But a permanent ban from Google? Seems a little excessive. Again, there were never any other campaigns in that account, which I opened around the beginning of this year, but never used until August. I also have two other accounts, which do not appear to be banned and are connected by an MCC account, which includes client accounts (campaigns for local small businesses). Only the client campaigns are currently running in the MCC and I’ll have to keep an eye on whether they keep running. The only other campaign I’ve personally had running in those accounts was an old Clickbank campaign which I turned off about a month ago. Might see if I can reactivate that one. Another funny thing I noticed – a couple of campaigns that had been google slapped a year ago and got zero impressions on for months have been getting a trickle of impressions again after months of inactivity. I have no idea why. I think I’ll delete all those slapped campaigns anyhow, before I get these accounts banned also, if anything they’re the ones I would have expected to be hit for. I’m not sure I’d be able to create new campaigns in them anyway, will have to try. As you can tell, its not like I’ve been doing much with Adwords this whole year anyway, but this still complicates things for the future, if I cant run campaigns for local business clients.

One other reason for the ban hammer may have been that I didn’t have that account added to my MCC, which technically it should have been. Who knows. From the experience of others its useless trying to argue or even ask why the ban occured. Chasing it up will likely simply get my other accounts disabled, if their days aren’t numbered already.