If you’ve done biz with me or been reading this blog for a while – you know that I am into affiliate marketing and heavily so.
I do very little paid affiliate marketing and use the “workhorse” method of promoting my affiliate marketing websites/blogs through the use of articles, backlinks, directories, forums and all that good stuff. And as you know (or may not know Facebook and Twitter are excellent ways to get your campaigns in front of people that may be interested. I get some seriously good traffic from Twitter alone, Facebook is still me just basically screwing off with friends.
Recently however – I’ve gotten numerous emails and invitations to join “Adsense Click Clubs”. It’s a you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours kind of thing. In a nutshell, someone that is a member of a ClickClub will go make 5-7 impressions of your Google Advertisements on your website and then click on one ad per day. It doesn’t sound like much but when you see that some of these click clubs have hundreds of members – it could mean that someone that has a high PPC site say like “mesothelioma” or another high paying keyword website is raking in very decent money per day.
I wouldn’t participate in this simply because it’s wrong but also when you’re caught (and you will be caught it’s only a matter of time) your account will be banned from Adsense and you’ll lose any pending monies you have coming… do you have to repay Google for fraudulently obtained payments? I don’t know the answer to that one.
I’m also sure people are clicking links directly from the Click Clubs and landing on the sites they are falsifying clicks on and eventually the unnatural method (unnatural being one page directing numerous people to pages that are creating Adsense clicks) that people are hitting pages from will attract attention and I can almost guarantee you that every single site listed as a link within a ClickClub will get penalized.
In the meantime – don’t get sucked into Click Clubs, y’all.