A couple weeks ago, one of my friends made the comment that once he sees an advertisement on a blog, that blog loses credibility in his eyes. It’s a fair enough statement, right? Well, what if I told you this individual makes his living selling a product online using affiliate marketers? I was so taken aback that I called him out on it. Affiliate marketing has a negative perception in the social media world because of the way some folks choose to go about it.
Sharing vs. pushing
I think of myself as the type of affiliate marketer that shares products and services that I find useful in my own personal or business life. If you look at the affiliate ads lining the right-hand column of this page, you’ll find products I use and believe in. I purchased some with my own money but others have been provided for free. Just because a product is provided to me for free does not mean I will write a review about it. If I don’t like the product or service and plan to keep using it myself, I can’t recommend it to my readers. So my style of affiliate marketing on this blog is sharing.
There’s another way to make money with affiliate marketing. The first thing you do is find a niche like iPad speakers and then find a domain name that goes with that. You write a few dozen posts about iPad speakers and sprinkle affiliate links within those posts. You’ll make money as long as you keep writing periodic posts about iPad speakers. That style of affiliate marketing is pushing.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with being a pusher. Heck, I’m even working on setting up a few sites just to see how they do. However, if you come to this blog looking for me to push products, you’re going to be disappointed. I understand that it’s my job to make sure you don’t think that and this post is one way of doing that.
So, is my affiliate style pushing or sharing on JimRaffel.com? What do you think?