May a link be considered as advertising?

  • Unknown's avatar
    niarb · Member ·

    Hi, I am relatively new on wordpress.com but I just love this wonderful opportunity for free expression you are giving us!
    Being so naive, please let me fully understand one of wordpress.com rules: advertising.
    I understand that, on a basic blog (no upgrades) I am not allowed to run advertising, such as AdSense, Amazon affiliate program, ordinary clickable banners to commercial sites, and so on. I am okay with that.

    However, suppose I write a book and make it avalaible on a web service such as lulu.com, or I create t-shirts on sale at some web store. Would it be considered a violation to WP rules to link such pages (and those pages only) from my blog? Would you ban my blog, or charge me some fee, out of that?

    Thanks for answering,
    Niarb

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • Unknown's avatar
    timethief · Member ·

    No blogger initiated advertising, retailing or reselling the work or products created or services provided by anyone other than yourself is allowed on free hosted WordPress.com blogs. E-commerce transactions via shopping carts and the like cannot be conducted on free blogs from and being free hosted byWordPress.com

    Affiliate marketing blogs: Blogs with the primary purpose of driving traffic to affiliate programs and get-rich-quick schemes (“Make six figures from home!!”, “20 easy steps to top profits!!”, etc). This includes multi-level marketing (MLM) blogs and pyramid schemes. To be clear, people writing their own original book, movie or game reviews and linking them to Amazon, or people linking to their own products on Etsy do NOT fall into this category. Here is a thread in the support forums that talks more about which affiliate links are OK or not OK. http://en.wordpress.com/types-of-blogs/

  • Unknown's avatar
    niarb · Member ·

    Timethief, thanks for your prompt reply. I’ve read the TOS and many threads in this forum. However (I am probably a little slow…) I could not figure out whether my case applied or not.

    However, your answer in the link you provided

    Here we cannot sell anything from our blogs that we do not create ourselves.

    makes me think I CAN actually link to a t-shirt or book store, as long as the webpage I link to shows only stuff made by me.

    Thank you very much!

  • Unknown's avatar
    timethief · Member ·

    You’re welcome.

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