Affiliate Marketing – Ethics – To Be or Not to Be?..
That is the question, right?
Often comes up in forums, etc… do I have to buy all the products I’m gonna promote? I mean how can you really promote something unless you’ve used it yourself. Unless you’ve been there…as it were.
Well, this ongoing debate has surfaced in a place I’m frequenting more and more…
I’ve already popped up a quote from Tiffany Dow on this post and I can’t help heading back over there… ( I know, I know… pretty lady, right? OK! I plead guilty… but Tiff is real smart… let’s leave it that!)
Anyway, Tiffany is currently doing a live case study as an affiliate marketer promoting ‘you know who’s’ Magic of Making Up. Check it out here plus my comment and her response.
Thad has also popped on Tiff’s blog here.
Tiff is not comfortable with the whole “fake story” method some affiliates resort to using and Thad has suggested a 3rd party alternative which Tiffany is now doing in a “Dear Abby” style.
All cool!
I find the whole debate on the ethics of promoting stuff you haven’t actually used yourself fascinating.
Certainly, in the IM niche Thad and I only promote products we have used and got genuine benefit from but in other niches we don’t always. MOMU is a great example of this… I mean how can you really say you’ve used it unless you really have… unless you sling your husband / wife out for a trial. LOL!
Thad and I promote mainly in the financial services area… that’s our background… but we haven’t used all the products or services we promote. I mean you just can’t…
And all those dog training guides… I mean do you need to buy all of ‘em!
The short answer is of course you don’t. Your niche research should tell you if a product is good or not… what people are saying in the forums, etc… what the sales page is like…
After a while you get an instinct for these things and, of course refund rates are the acid test.
There is one area where I wouldn’t do this though and that’s pretty much anything medical… cures, pills, etc… we don’t do those anyway.
Another area is in the ‘Make Money Niche’… unless something has really helped YOU make some success online be very careful about pretending you’ve been there!
I always have a chuckle about all those sites that claim “I made $40,000 a month using ‘SuperSillyMoney X”. I just hope their Tax Returns match their claims! 
Let me know your thoughts!
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Tagged with: affiliate marketin ethics • affiliate marketing • ethical promotion • how to promote • how to promote products • internet marketing • internet marketing ethics • promoting products
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Great topic. I stay pretty much on the ethical side of things but just like you outside of the IM niche there is no way you can buy all the products (even in the IM niche).
Most times if I really need the product I would email the merchant and say hey look, lets help each other out here. I already made a couple of sales for you….my id is such and such and it would benefit the both of us if you could give me a review copy. [insert other ego boosting stuff here]. I’d really like to do a full campaign for you.
Sometimes they’ll send it, sometimes they won’t and sometimes they won’t even respond. I’ll just check see if they protected their download page. Sometimes they don’t and you can usually download the product for free…check it out and you know if its good or not.
Another thing that makes me shake my head is the spammers. “Get Google Ads Free works. Blah Blah….”
Hell, if it worked wouldn’t they be promoting every single product on every affiliate network via Adwords?
Yep, asking the merchant is a great way to do it Jay. Like you said some play ball… some don’t.
We get a lot of stuff sent to us as well… most is crap, so we don’t bother.
Important point on protecting your stuff as well but even with a robots.txt file there are ways around it. People will always find ways to steal stuff.
Thad and I take the view that it’s still getting the word out.
Here’s an interesting example. The recent WA trial and our bonuses. You had to go to a ’special’ page and put in your WA name and subscription ID so we could ‘verify’ it.
We had NO way of doing that automatically and people could have put anything in there!!
And get this…the number of people who took up the trial through us was MORE than the number who downloaded the bonuses!!
Makes you think, eh? Most people are pretty honest. We’ll always get bad apples… but that’s life I guess.
You know…just to add something…
I think one big misconception in this area is that you have to actually “endorse” a particular product as an affiliate.
There’s really never a need to go down the road of just making up stories or firsthand experiences when you haven’t actually tried it…not to mention it can get you in really hot water since the FTC is moving to crack down on misleading endorsements and fake stories.
It’s easy to add value by doing things such as simply comparing products or providing excellent information about a topic and directing people to an additional resource.
Even in the case of rankings and reviews, you can write and word them according to a consensus of other reviews, bbb ratings, benefits one offers over another, a survey of user reviews on the web, etc. And you can easily rank products according to a number of factors that don’t depend on buying or using a product.
An example to think about is something like RottenTomatoes with movie reviews. They don’t actually review movies themselves, but rather add value by providing people with an overall consensus of movie reviewers across the country.
But really, just putting yourself in the customer’s shoes and doing some good legwork for people is great value so they don’t have to piece all the info together and spend hours comparing things.
Wording things like…
“According to many user reviews of people who bought _______”
or
“I heard a great story about someone who tried ______”
…works just fine without feeling a need to lie and say you’ve tried something.
Thad