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I’ve been an adult porn affiliate for a few years with a small network of sites so this question may seem odd since you would think I’d know the answer by now.
If I start to collect email addresses from the visitors to my blogs, can I use this data to send out a newsletter with updates about my blogs and the sponsors I promote?
The reason I’m not sure about this is because when I first signed up to promote sponsors I seem to recall reading (in affiliate agreements) that email spamming is not allowed. But what I am proposing would not be spam because I would tell visitors up front that by subscribing to my newsletter they will be getting gay porn information, and of course they can unsubscribe at any time.
Again, this is probably a basic, maybe dumb question and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of you do this already. But I just thought of a possible idea where having an email newsletter might boost my sales so I thought I’d ask here for advice rather than hitting up each of the sponsors I promote individually.
Most sponsors are okay with it – that is if you follow all the rules (double opt-in / opt-out link in the mail). I have seen a couple of sponsors, who ask you to contact them about it first. As long as they don’t mention anything in their TOS, I would just assume they allow you to do e-mail marketing.
Most are ok, but you really want to check each adult sponsor and their terms. Some programs have a strict no email policy and will cancel your account if you do, i think it’s mainly some older big straight programs that do that though.
As others have said I think it depends on the sponsor, I can recall that at least 2 large ones stated no email marketing in their terms, from back when I started, but I can not recall which ones they were unfortunately.
That is entirely different to sending out your own email to subscribers about your posts though. You can do that without any links to the sponsors and just draw the traffic to the blog if the sponsors have issues with the links in emails. That is what I tend to do when I send a newsletter out.
There are some laws in different places about email subscriptions and opt-in. I would suggest a double opt-in to cover yourself as this seems to be the general standard in countries that have implemented legislation covering it.
For our part (my adult site), we accept bulk e-mail promotion if you are the legal owner of the list and you collect it on 18+ websites (ex-members, customers, newsletter).
Best to ask the sponsor first….
OK, I guess I’ll start to email individual sponsors… this will be a good weekend project.
But if I only promote my blogs in a newsletter, but my blogs promote sponsors, isn’t that still technically violating their terms in a round about way?
I can not see how that would violate any terms really. It is your subscribers and you are promoting your product to them. Plus the sponsors benefit from that. Really can not see anything against this practice, it is your readers, your contacts, you can promote your stuff to them without a problem.
This no different from promoting your blog on Twitter, Facebook or Tumblr and thus should be okay.
For us, I think it depends where the list comes from. If it’s an opt-in email list on your adult blog for one of our porn sites, then yes, we’d love it. If it’s a list of 1,000,000 emails you bought from some guy on GFY, than you are going to get banned. As others stated, the best is always to ask, everyone wants to make money as long as it doesn’t risk us getting into trouble.
