Affiliate Marketing, Honest or Dishonest?

What is Honest Affiliate Marketing?

If you find a good product that you would recommend with good conscience to your friends, you might decide to refer it to others from your website. You can become an affiliate and you can earn money for your referrals. Or if you find a product you think is a good one and you are interested in it, you might want to promote it, and sell it. You might decide to design a web site around that subject and sell the product and you might have some good information about that subject that you can offer to visitors.

Can you really make money doing this?

Yes you can make money on the Internet with affiliate marketing. Very simply, affiliate marketing is when a person gets paid for recommending, referring or selling products for people who provide them.

Hyped Affiliate Marketing

Hyped up Affiliate Marketing is not an illegal business, but it can be a cut-throat hyped up process bordering on very annoying marketing techniques for products that may not be worth what people are paying for them. Here are some very common tactics used by affiliate marketers, that for me, seem to border on dishonest or "cheesy" tactics. Everything I write about is from my personal experience.

Phoney Review Sites

“Review” sites with slanted or dishonest reviews that are written only for the purpose of selling a particular product. If a review has no real or known author, (a real person) then what good is it? A review written by a fictitious or anonymous person is not worth anything. Just because it shows up on a web page does not make it true, useful, or legitimate

Fabricated Testimonials

Sites filled with insincere or completely fabricated testimonials for the product that cannot be verified are worthless and not to be believed. Does this seem honest to you?

Useless Articles and Content

Websites filled with mindless drivel and re-written articles, masquerading as valuable content but written for the purpose of injecting certain key words for search engine traffic. These sites are plentiful on the Internet. Thousands have the same information, rehashed and rewritten to avoid being spotted as duplicate content.

Rewriting articles to use as content is not dishonest and if the article is useful and informative to your site visitor this is not a bad thing, many people do this successfully and improve their site for the visitor. But content for the express purpose of being food for spiders (search engine robots) just to get a page listing are not benefiting the visitor. Some super affiliates call these articles "Spider food." They are not for the visitor and few people read them.

Pictures of models who look like doctors

This one really gets me, and it is insulting and laughable. Of course most people know that these are models, (or do they?) but if that is true, then what is the purpose of the picture? The picture of an authority figure or doctor giving advice about health products, weight-loss etc. in order to lend some credibility to the product is a common website strategy hardly noticed anymore by surfers. A question to ask is, “Is this a real expert or a real doctor? If they claim it is, how many people will find out for sure who this person is, what his background is, and what his credentials are? Probably very few if any. Most people (I think) assume that this is probably not a real person. If it is not a real person, then what is the real point? There is no point, except to sell the product. I ask you, does this seem honest to you?

Unsolictited Emails, Spam, Pop ups, Pop unders etc.

I don't think very many people like spam. Products that are promoted by spam should be looked at with caution. Websites that use pop ups or pop under windows for advertising and open windows you did not call for, are pushy and annoying. Personally, I can't get out of there fast enough and I never go back.

So what is Honest Affiliate Marketing?

The reason for the mindless drivel of useless articles on some affiliate websites, is because of the power of the search engines. Search engines really do want to help people find the useful information and products that they are looking for so they are constantly upgrading the way they rank websites for search engine placement. As fast as they do, the Affiliate marketers invent ways to get higher listings so they can sell their products. If you are honest, and you have a good product you probably need to know some of the tricks used by the marketing gurus and you might want to become aware of their methods.

It is easy to be an honest Affiliate Marketer. Just be honest. Don’t fill your site with useless drivel and re-written articles. Don’t use phoney reviews and fabricated testimonials. Give people some valuable information and original articles. Sell products you know about and like and would truly recommend to your friends and family or someone else who might be looking for that product. Sell and write about products you are interested in or products people are looking for, but don’t use trickery and lies to do it. Just be honest.

Some people just want to make money and they don’t care how they do it. I am not saying they are bad people. I just don’t think I would trust their opinion or their fabricated testimonials and phoney reviews where it concerns the product itself, because I know that their motivation is simply to sell the product and make some money. If you are reading a review of a product or products, look to see who the person or company giving the review is. Who are they? Where are they? Can you get in touch with them? Are they a real company or real person? Why should you believe them? If you can’t know or find out these things, then why on earth should you listen to their opinions or purchase their products?