Rabs To Riches

Morality and Ethics in Affiliate Marketing

photo credit: BigMcGuire

A couple months ago I was still in a dilemma on this issue and thus postponed posting. It all started when I actually decided to promote a product a colon cleanse product based on its high payout. I actually went and developed an optin page (we’ll talk about my random, pointless action approaches at a later point in time) and then as I was searching thru Google and trying to scope out my competition, I realized that a lot of people who had used it were having not having the most pleasant experience with the product. On top of that, they had next to no luck contacting Customer Service for the company.

I stopped promoting (or my journey to future promoting ) right away. I just couldn’t promote something I didn’t believe in. Now, do you have to have tested and tried everything you becoming an affiliate for? Ofcourse not - especially in the case of physical products that are backed by . But I think especially for ingestible items you have a greater responsibility. There are health factors involved. Even in the case of information products that promise something - they should deliver on that. So at least an affiliate should do a search for user experiences, if they can’t formally review the product themselves.

So in between the traveling, the flu, and the catching up that I’ve been doing, I’ve reached some clarity on where I stand in terms of morality and ethics in this industry:

1. I will not promote something that I don’t think lives up to its claims. This is easier to do with information products since they are easier to review, but even with health related items you can usually do searches and see what the general user experience is. Anything it could have some bad reviews, but if something is predominantly regarded as unsatisfactory, then I wouldn’t promote it.

2. I will not pollute the web with useless content spinned gobbledygook pages. I recently saw an example of this, and even though it was absolutely hilarious, it is just polluting the web.

3. I won’t use blackhat techniques. I guess I’m just a wuss when it comes to this - I am too scared to use them. Even though they may not technically be ‘harming’ anyone, I do believe its wrong because its gaming the system.

Those are the basics of what I’ve come up with and just having this settled in my own mind helps me go forward . Following this mini code of ethics will allow me to at least sleep better at night and prevent any nagging feelings of the conscience.

Flunking with Facebook Flyers (and Ads)

Since I have an actual goal for November, along with the long term projects I’m working on, I figured I should try to concurrently work on things that will possibly help me reach my goal in the short term as well. I got a WSO on Facebook Flyers last week and I thought I’d try my hands on it this past weekend.

I guess I got on this bandwagon kind of late and Facebook had already put fairly strict measures on affiliate links (etc) and squeeze pages. That was basically what I would have been trying to do for the short term. I put out about 3 ads and all of them got disabled pretty quickly.

Most of what I’ve read from the other forums and feedback from other blogs seems to indicate the same thing. The ads that are showing have really bad CTRs. I think it might be that the Facebook crowd is not there to respond to ads. I mean, I joined Facebook because all my friends were on there - to connect with them, write on walls, etc. I feel the majority of the Facebook crowd is such.

Anyway, it cost me Friday night, but at least I tried it. So I don’t feel too bad. But yeah, the WSO was pretty bad considering that this guy charged $57 for it (yeah I know I’m a total sucker).  However, he did make me aware of the opportunity, and I’m horrible with refunds, so live and learn.

Anyway, off to continue on to longer term opportunities and use what I know to reach my short term goal as well.

NMOC Blues (a.k.a Picking a Bad Affiliate Program)

One thing that I’ve learned is that it takes just as much research and time to promote a product with $7 commission as it does to promote a product with a $100 commission. Of course, I learned it the hard way.

Back in April, I bought Niche Marketing On Crack, and I thought it was a pretty well laid out plan and got to work right away. However, instead of doing proper research (that I knew how to do and had done for so many other products), I went into Commission Junction and picked one of the newest programs added - Bob Greene’s Best Life Diet membership.

Bad Move 1: People might disagree with me but at least on sites like ShareASale and CJ, I would NOT recommend people to join brand new affiliate programs. A lot of these companies are just testing the waters. However, because Bob Greene was a big name and backed by Oprah I thought I was relatively safe and didn’t think about the ‘new’ factor too much. It was also paying $18 commission per sale after the 10-day free trial.

Bad Move 2: The competition was just horrific. On top of that, “Best” is a stop word, which means that it’s too common of a word and some search engines don’t ‘record’ it in order to speed up searches. Do not just pick affiliate programs on a whim - just do the research.

I did actually go on to make a couple sales from the site so I know the NMOC formula works. I also got a few additions to my autoresponder. It’ s just it was a horrible thing to begin with. I thought of it like my guinea pig site and spent some time doing different things with it. Looking back, I think I spent way too much time on it.

Anyway, one day I’m looking at my Analytics account and see that the site has gotten a decent amount of traffic and I see people clicked thru to the affiliate link, but for some reason I am not seeing any clicks on CJ. I went to my site and clicked thru to the link to test it.

Turns out they close the affiliate program WITHOUT notifying any of the affiliates! How unprofessional! I was pretty depressed since I had spent quite some time on developing the site. A couple weeks later I saw that this particular program was being managed by another company who were managing other diet memberships. But now they were only paying $12. I went ahead and changed the links because some $ is better than no $.

Recently while just tracking my sales, I went and saw that they had now changed the payout to $7 - once again without any notification, but at least the links were still active. Anyway, this whole thing left such a bad taste in my mouth. You’d think that such a big name program would at least have the decency to notify their affiliates when closing the program.

Anyway lessons learned:

1. Spend time promoting big payout affiliate programs
2. Really really do good research about the market demand and competition
3. Don’t spend forever on something. Crunching out this NMOC site should not have taken me this long. Be efficient and don’t be a perfectionist
4. Don’t promote memberships who are not paying you recurring income.

Quality Content

This is such a vital issue in Internet Marketing. What qualifies as quality content? Can a few paragraphs with an affiliate link thrown in the middle pass as good quality content? There are no hard and fast rules, but I believe there are degrees of content quality. Spam is the absolute worst, and those newsletters that you can’t wait to devour are at the top of the list, and then there’s some stuff in between. Sometimes new internet marketers tend to fall in this in-between category.

I think the problem lies in trying too hard. We are trying so hard to write a good article, or to write a pre-sell, or to prevent a sales pitch from sounding like a sales pitch, or to stuff keywords in our articles to make them relevant, that we truly lose the essence of own voice in writing. This creates a horribly written end piece that does not appeal to the user. And because of that, you lose. You lose the reader. You lose the potential sale. You lose credibility.

Now, if you just stopped trying really hard and forcing the writing, and instead, took a deep breath, and started ’speaing’ in your own voice, you’ll see a completely different piece develop. Most of all, write with the audience in mind. Write with respect for the audience in mind. I’m reading Robert McKee’s Story, and he mentions this point in his introduction, and it really hit home. Think about how your readers will feel when they read what you have written. Ed Dale has re-iterated this point over and over again in the 30 Day Challenge - Simple put, when the reader comes to your page, do they get happy or do they get sad?

Yes, its just as basic as that. Respect your audience, give them quality content, and make them happy :).