Affiliate Marketing – How to Legally Make Money Selling Someone Else’s Stuff
Affiliate marketing allows anyone to market a company’s products in order to earn a commission from sales that are referred by their website. But what provides an advantage for a website when there are thousands of others that are doing the same thing? The blog entry “How to Succeed In Affiliate Marketing Business?” provides tips for developing a successful affiliate marketing website. They suggest targeting a niche market instead of being too broad in the products being sold in order to convince visitors of the author’s expertise on the subject. The site should also contain information that is relevant to the products that are being offered; such as product reviews and suggestions for product use. A website should also stay in touch with visitors to keep them coming back, this can be done through an email newsletter or by offering an RSS feed.
The post “Askvertising and the Future of Online Advertising” coins the phrase “askvertising” to describe when websites ask visitors to click on their affiliate marketing in order to help support the site. This raises a good question, how can you expect website authors to be impartial and trustworthy when their livelihood is made by people clicking on the affiliate advertising? The blog entry compares asking people to make their purchases through a site’s affiliate links to a church or charity asking for donations. The difference is that this type of donation cannot be made unless the visitor has decided to purchasing something from the (or one of the) affiliate websites. This provides more of an incentive for the website to encourage people to make purchases, especially on the products that earn them high commissions.
So how does an affiliate website gain the trust of visitors? The blog entry “Offer True Value to Gain Affiliate Marketing Success” suggests that the website author show that they are familiar with the product and that they have tried using it. Some suggestions of how this could be done are by posting photos of themselves with the product or using it, write about the benefits and disadvantages of the product focusing on its use, and talk about or show the outcomes of using the product. So for example a digital camera review could show familiarity with a camera by having photos of the camera with a hand for scale comparison, photos taken with the camera, and explaining how the controls on the camera worked compared to other brands and models.
Why Should I Believe You? The Credibility of Blogging
A blog is considered a credible source of information because the review or recommendation has been posted by someone who is just like everyone else, not a marketer trying to sell something. However it is obvious that there are blogs that we cannot consider to be a credible resource. So what factors make us consider a blog credible?
The Slideshare presentation “What Makes a Website Credible?” suggests that web credibility is based on the formula, perceived trustworthiness + perceived expertise = perceived credibility. Without either the belief of trustworthiness or expertise the website is not thought of as credible by visitors.
Perceived expertise can be attributed to how narrow the focus of the blog the post topics are, as suggested by the entry “SMB4: Bloggers – Credibility VS Popularity”. A blogger who posts about a certain niche topic, depending on the content of the posts, comes across as knowledgeable in that topic. In contrast someone who posts on whatever is on their mind and might not have two posts on the same topic likely will come across as less knowledgeable on the subject. Expertise is essential to gaining credibility whether it is gained through education, experience, or through a connection with the reader, such as a shared interest.
Being discovered as being paid to post about certain products or services can take away from the perceived trustworthiness of your blog. By taking money for endorsements a blogger can be thought of as promoting things they know nothing about or even dislike in order to get paid. However a paid blogger who has the other factor in the equation, expertise, and has a history of saying what they feel, as described in the post “How Much Do Top Tier Bloggers and Social Media Consultants Get Paid? We Asked Them!” would be perceived as being more trustworthy than a blog that promotes anything and everything.
So as the Businessweek blog, Blogspotting, mentioned in the post “The blogosphere is not ‘credible’” blogs cannot be generalized as credible however individual blogs can be assessed for credibility.
