Our Objective

At the Heron Academy our objective is to increase the income of all of our members, and as a result, have our free members continue to use our website, and have our paying members retain their subscriptions. Our business model is simple - by teaching our members real ways to make money, we in turn make money from on-going subscriptions and advertising revenue.

In order to uphold our core objective, we make a guarantee to all of our members -

Nowhere on the Heron Academy site will you find us, or any of our staff, posting an affiliate link to any recommended product or service.

We also prohibit any members from posting affiliate links of any kind anywhere. This includes posting links to landing pages that in turn direct to an affiliate product, or to a personal product that doesn't offer substantial value.

We encourage members to help one another without any immediate rewards in mind. This leads to better business & networking in the long term.

No Affiliate Link Guarantee

Any recommendation we make of a product or service is 100% genuine, and in your best interest, not ours. We do not stand to profit from any recommendations we make, and if we do, we will fully disclose this fact. Unless however any such disclosure exists, you can be certain that we have no affiliation with the recommended product or service. We do not make any money or commission from third party websites we do not own (the sole exception to this is any Adsense advertising that may appear on our site).

If for example we recommend Aweber as a good service for handling e-mail marketing, we will not include an affiliate link to the Aweber website. Instead we will give you the direct, non-affiliate link. We make no profit from our recommendations, in any way whatsoever.

By doing this, we prove that we're not in the business of just making money from our members. Instead, our main interest is seeing our members succeed by recommending the best services available, and as a result, having them stay at our website.


The Policy

We guarantee you will not find an affiliate link posted anywhere on our website by us, or any of our staff. Members of the Heron Academy are not allowed to post affiliate links anywhere either, and whilst we will do our best to remove any affiliate links that members create, we cannot guarantee there will be no links on the member forums, or within member blogs, or comments.

With that being said, here's how our guarantee works. If you locate an affiliate link that we created (not a member, hacker, or third party), then simply contact us with a link to the page in question, and tell us where the link is located (be it in a tutorial, official blog post, or anywhere else). We will immediately remove the link, and on top of that, will pay you $100* directly into your PayPal account as a result of us failing to uphold our guarantee. We will also publicly acknowledge the breach.

If you locate an affiliate link that we didn't create (such as a link posted in a comment or on our forum from a paying member), anywhere on our website, then let us know and we will remove it immediately. We will not pay out the $100 if the affiliate link didn't come from us however (ie: a regular member posted it), as this is beyond our control.

We hope that this guarantee shows that we're not in the business of 'cashing out' from our members actions, milking them for every last dollar possible. Whilst we respect the importance of affiliate links, we also understand the conflict of interest they create within a niche such as Internet marketing, and therefore we choose not to use them anywhere within the Heron Academy, and we also prohibit our members from using them too.

To report an affiliate link, please use the appropriate section on the forum.