GoTreads Affiliate Program Terms of Service

We reserve the right to review and moderate all affiliate registrations. Please note that the review process may take some time as applications are taken into consideration – we know how eager you must be to become an affiliate, and we appreciate your patience.

How To Promote GoTreads

How you promote GoTreads is reflected in the commission you earn! We encourage the use of promotional methods that add value to GoTreads and bring us legitimate, loyal customers. We recommend creating unbiased written content and/or videos or tutorials, where it’s suitable to showcase GoTreads.

Here are a few examples of commonly used promotional methods used by the most successful affiliates for inspiration: 

• Tell clients, customers, or friends about GoTreads, and give them your affiliate referral link (letting them know that you actually use it & can highly recommend it but you would earn a small commission for the referral)
• Write a review or a blog post or create a video about a topic in travel or overlanding and mention GoTreads where it makes sense to do so. Link back to our website with your affiliate referral link and proper disclosure.
• Reach out to a broad audience with your social network accounts. Tweet about us on Twitter with your affiliate referral link, post about us on Facebook with your affiliate link, or communicate to your Linkedin followers about affiliate marketing with your affiliate link. Spam-free promotion is a great way to get more referrals!
• Write a review or a blog post about affiliate marketing or GoTreads and link to our site with your referral link.
• Provide value to others by answering related questions in communities/personally and request them to use your referral link if they choose to make a purchase. 

In connection with any marketing efforts you choose to make for our products, please ensure that all promotional materials adhere to the following guidelines.

1. You must not violate any law or regulation governing (i) false or deceptive advertising, (ii) sweepstakes, or (iii) gambling.
2. You must not offer incentives to users to click on ads or complete offers that award them cash, points, prizes or automatically enter them into contests, drawings, or sweepstakes.
3. Your promotional materials must not contain any trade disparagement or libelous, defamatory, or infringing content; and
   1. do not contain any machine-readable code that could be unintentionally downloaded onto a recipient’s computer (such as a worm, virus, Trojan Horse, or other self-executing programs) and damage or take over the recipient’s computer.
4.  Your websites and/or videos must not contain any materials that are:
   1. Obscene, or pornographic;
   2. Offensive, profane, hateful, threatening, harmful, defamatory, libelous, harassing, or discriminatory (whether based on race, ethnicity, creed, religion, gender, sexual orientation, physical disability, or otherwise);
   3. Graphically violent; or
   4. Solicitous of any unlawful behavior.
5. Above all, you must comply with all laws, ordinances, rules regulations, orders, licenses, permits, judgments, decisions, or other requirements of any governmental authority that has jurisdiction over you, whether those laws, etc. are now in effect or later come into effect during the time you are an affiliate, including the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 as well as FTC rules and guidelines regarding endorsements, disclosures, and testimonials. 

Product Reviews

In the event that you create a review of GoTreads, you should make sure that you disclose upfront that you receive a percentage of each sale made. In addition, all endorsements must reflect the honest opinions or experiences of the endorser. Any disclosures must be clear and conspicuous and not hidden. The most important principle is that an endorsement has to represent the accurate experience and opinion of the endorser. 

Beyond this, you must abide by the following guidance: 

1. You cannot talk about your experience with a product if you haven’t tried it. 
2. If you were paid to try a product and you thought it was terrible, you can’t say it’s terrific.
3. You can’t make claims about a product that would require proof you don’t have. For example, you can’t say a product will cure a particular disease if there isn’t scientific evidence to prove that’s true. 
4. Furthermore, such disclosures must be made clearly, frequently, and conspicuously. Such disclosures ensure that readers can formulate an informed opinion about the information you provide by understanding the possible influence your material connection with our company might have on your endorsement of our products. 

Linking in Articles and/or Videos

When using your GoTreads affiliate link in an article and/or in videos, you must display a crystal clear disclosure about the nature of your affiliate links and the material connection you have with our company. These disclosures must appear on the same page where the links appear, and they must be clear, conspicuous, and require no additional user interaction to read (such as clicking a link, scrolling, or hovering over an element). 

According to the FTC themselves, “Putting disclosures in obscure places – for example, buried on an About Us or General Info page, or behind a poorly labeled hyperlink or in a Terms of Service agreement isn’t good enough. The average person who visits your site must be able to notice your disclosure, read it and understand it”. 

And as such, this means that all disclosures should appear in full either before or in close proximity to the affiliate link itself. 

Here’s a quick example for you: 

Disclosure: Some of the links in this post/video are “affiliate links” – what this means is that if you click on the link and choose to make a purchase, I will receive an affiliate commission.

Sharing On Social Networks

When using your GoTreads affiliate link on social networks, you must also display a clear disclosure about the nature of the links and the material connection that you have with our company. In the form of social media posts, these disclosures must be a part of the post that contains the affiliate link. 

Example Twitter Disclosure: 

“I’ve been using GoTreads for over a year and highly recommend taking it for a spin too – here’s my link… #ad”

Furthermore, you must abide by the respective terms of services, terms of conditions, and any other applicable legal terms between you and the network that you use. 

How NOT To Promote GoTreads

Curating a definitive list of the allowed methods of promotion would be endless because there are tons of opportunities. However, what we can do to put your mind at ease is cover what is absolutely prohibited as a part of GoTreads’s affiliate program. 

If your promotional methods step outside of these affiliate terms, your referrals may be rejected and we may disable your affiliate account. We reserve the right to do this and may or may not notify you in the instance that this occurs. Please only use allowed promotional methods and help us help you succeed as an affiliate – we thank you for your understanding & support! 

We love and back our product 100% which is why we’re all the more careful with how it’s promoted and want affiliates who support us in ethical ways: 

• GoTreads may not be promoted on coupon websites
  Customers who are searching for a GoTreads coupon are already in the market for GoTreads, so this method adds no value to GoTreads.
• Paid advertising using GoTreads’s trademark/brand name is prohibited
  Buying ads through any service, including but not limited to Google AdWords, social media advertising, or retargeting ads using our brand keywords and your affiliate link will result in affiliate account deactivation.
• Promoting incorrect or misleading information
  Any promotional activity that makes use of incorrect or misleading information will result in affiliate account deactivation. This includes false information intended to clickbait potential customers. If you are unsure of the correct information or details for promoting GoTreads, please contact us – we are always happy to help.
• Any type of spam is prohibited
  Spam in any form – where it is a link, ad, email, or comment is prohibited. Please respect the posting rules of any 3rd-party websites you use to promote GoTreads. This is not an exhaustive list of spam methods – note that if we deem that your activity is spam, it is spam.
• Any illegal activity or activity deemed offensive by us is prohibited
  This one really goes without saying and will result in referrals being rejected and/or your affiliate account being deactivated.
• Posing as a representative/acting in association with GoTreads
  We’re very flattered, but please don’t pretend to be a professional associated with GoTreads. Affiliates are not considered employees of GoTreads and have no employee rights. 
• Pretending to be GoTreads is strictly prohibited
  Cloning our website, copying our website, or using any of our copyrighted assets, and pretending that a site created by you is an official GoTreads website is unethical and prohibited (this includes using services that automatically clone websites, or place them into iframes) 

Refund Purchases

Referrals older than 30 days and in good standing (i.e. the purchase has not been refunded) will be included with each commission payout (if the commission balance totals $200 or over). If a purchase is refunded, a commission won’t be paid out for that referral.

We reserve the right to reject affiliate commissions for any reason. Commission rejections may occur for the following reasons:

1. The sale that the referral was based on was refunded.
2. The method by which the referral was generated was in violation of our promotional policies (see above) or violated the spirit of the Affiliate Agreement.

For chargebacks on a transaction that an affiliate payout has already been made for – we will deduct that from your subsequent payout. If there is no commission in the next month, your affiliate balance will turn negative. 

Referral Cookie Lifetime

The cookie lifetime is set to 30 days, and is first-click, meaning the first affiliate link will be awarded attribution for referring a user/customer. Once attributed to an affiliate, that affiliate will earn a commission on all purchases from that customer within 30 days.

Affiliate News & Updates

By becoming an affiliate you agree to receive emails from us. These emails will be sent to affiliates only, on an ad-hoc basis, and may include important information regarding the GoTreads affiliate program. These emails will also provide you with relevant news and updates to help you effectively promote GoTreads. 

Please note that as an affiliate, you may be privy to embargoed or time-sensitive information in these emails (this information may only be promoted after an embargo is lifted). 

Questions Regarding Your Application

When you apply to become an affiliate, we may email you at the email address you have supplied with some additional questions regarding your application. 

This may be due to the following reasons: 

• We didn’t understand something in your application, or,
• We’d like to learn a bit more about how you intend to promote GoTreads and need a little more detail. 

If we reach out to you and we haven’t heard back within 7 days, your application may be rejected. If your initial application is rejected, you are welcome to reapply to become an affiliate and provide us with more detail for reconsideration. 

Dormant Affiliate Accounts

We encourage all of our affiliates to actively promote GoTreads to keep earning referral commissions. If we can help you come up with ideas on how to promote GoTreads, please do not hesitate to reach out – we’re here for you! An affiliate account is considered dormant if no visits have been generated after a 6-month period. A dormant affiliate account will be temporarily deactivated if no visits have been generated after 6 months.