Being Ethical in Online Marketing
What I’m about to share in this post may come as somewhat of a surprize to people, some may agree some disagree, that’s totally fine, my intention is to share my thoughts on being ethical when marketing online and also where I feel I have fallen down in this area sometimes myself.
Online marketing offers many great benefits, a few being the flexibility it provides of when and where you can work, and also the scope of customers you can reach anywhere in the world. Many people also prefer not to have to deal with customers face to face, and this again is an appealing aspect of the web.
However there are many things that are not so great about online marketing, in particular I’m referring to ‘ethics’ and lack thereof from many people.
There are a number of causes for this lack of ethics, and I’ll going into specifics later in the post, however I believe a common one is desperation. When people struggle to make money online, they often resort to doing things that they would otherwise not ever do, and especially never do if they had to deal with the customer face to face. It’s this lack of personal interaction, which somewhat makes it easier for people to be unethical in their ventures, because they never see the impact on real people, they just deal with their keyboard.
In addition to this, another HUGE factor that contributes to unethical behaviour is greed. When people start to get a taste of making money, and I’m guilty of this too, it can be all too easy to keep wanting more and more money, and then to compromise on ethics to get it. There is no excuse for this, it’s just simply not cool.
Although I’m referring to unethical behaviour in the internet marketing world, I see much worse unethical behaviour in the corporate world all the time. The banking section is the worse I’ve ever come across, you can’t tell me that ‘fractional reserve lending’ is ethical and fair, and that’s only the start of it when it comes to the corrupt international banksters. Just look at the Federal Reserve Bank of America, most people falsely assume this bank is a government agency…I’m afraid not. Anyway, the point is that corruption is everywhere, and the common areas I see online marketers become unethical is with affiliate marketing and also selling info products as vendors.
The main issue that I’ve battled with over the years of doing affiliate marketing, is how to create a content based site that is not overly bias towards the vendor you’re an affiliate for, to the point where you cross over into deception. A lot of this comes down to the keywords you choose to market the site on. For example, if you target ‘buyer keywords’ such brand names, product names and model numbers, these can be great for conversions. The reason they are great for conversions is that people who type these keywords into Google are at the end of the buying cycle and often just looking for one more site to push them over the line to buy, unless their is something they should know to stop them.
So what’s so wrong with that, I hear you ask….well the issue I have is that most affiliates who rank for these types of keywords always place the product in a positive light, often regardless of whether they actually know if the product is good or not. Most affiliates don’t go to the lengths of actually researching the products that they are writing about, and just whack up some content and hope that it does the job and makes sales.
The fact is this does make sales, although not as well as it used to, however I know it works. The reason I know is because I used to do it myself, which I now think is not cool. If you purchased my Rapid Profit Formula, in the first version I showed an example site that did this, however I no longer think that’s the right way to write reviews, which I will go into more detail now.
I think a better way to build affiliate marketing sites is to either buy the product that you are affiliated with, and do a proper review of it, or at least research it very carefully and do real comparisons against other competition products and tell the truth.
You can always be an affiliate for all the options, this way you can be upfront about the product, and if it’s not a great choice, say so in your review and recommend a product that’s better. However this does not mean you should recommend a product that pays out more commission just to make more money. It’s possible to write good reviews on products, as long as you research. The aim for an affiliate should be to act like a friend to the website visitor and help them. If you’re in a niche where you don’t feel you can do this with the products, then I suggest starting a new niche.
Furthermore, if you choose keywords that are not product related ie. info keywords, you can simply provide valuable content on the topic and then tell people if they want to try a product that helps do XZY then here’s a one ==>Affiliate Link<==, or again just use banners and let them do the work.
I think the ideal position of the affiliate is to be a solid resource for a potential buyer, like a mini Wikipedia on a particular niche topic, so their sites actually help the visitor to make a more informed buying decision. Far too often, and again I have been guilty of this myself, I see affiliates building sites solely targeting buyer keywords because they convert well, and producing dishonestly positive reviews, to coerce the visitor into buying the product. There is no way this is ethical, and the worse culprits are affiliates that pretend they have used the product and it falesy claim it gave them great results, even worse is having a fake photo on the site pretending it is a photo of the website owner. You must have seen the reviews that go something like this:
“I used suffer acne, then I bought XYZ product and now my acne is gone and I feel amazing…you can check it out for yourself here ==>Affiliate link<==”.
I can happily say that I never once did that, as I always thought that was going way to far, but I have been guilty of writing positive reviews about products I didn’t research as well as I should have, but will never do it again.
With all that said, there is a place for well-done affiliate marketing sites, but I strongly believe they have to be seen as great mini resources for people, and have real solid, well researched and written content, and even videos if possible, that come along side the potential buyer and help them work out what product, if any, is right for them. This can be done on the site itself, or later through email marketing, or like I said earlier just have banner ads in your sidebar if like.
Now this is where I’ve seen things stoop to very low levels of ethics indeed. The Internet Marketing niche is the worst, but not alone, as I’ve seen pretty terrible deception in other niches from product owners also, the dating niche comes to mind. Anyway, what I find the most frustrating are the marketers that create products on a particular internet marketing topic that they themselves know nothing about, and are not even doing themselves. This is really bad in my books and frankly pretty difficult for more to comprehend. These products come in the form of ebooks and software, it doesn’t matter it all bad news. So please be very careful before you buy something from someone who has not proven to be legitimate.
You might ask yourself why these dodgy products sell at all, and the sad fact is that unsuspecting people who read over hyped, yet well written sales pages, are easily convinced and buy. These pages are full of lies, such as fake earnings, fake testimonies, and outlandish claims of success people will have while using the product. Again I can gladl say, that none of these things I have ever done myself, as all my products are birthed from real results.
However I have not been 100% squeaky clean (although I will be from now on), so in the vein of being ethical let me lead by example, as I like to make sure I always do the right thing be everyone on my email list.
Although I never promote products unless I think they are very good, and I know the owner is a legitimate marketer who knows their stuff, I have fallen guilty of doing a few tactics that I now look back on with disapproval. For example, I have in the past stated that bonus packs I have offered as part of a promotion I’m doing for a joint venture partner are limited, when in actual fact I have not followed through on that and ended up letting as many people have the bonus as wanted it! How is that ethical, it’ not, and I should never ever have done it. For this I’m sorry, as it’s just not on, and can assure you that you’ll never see me do that again.
I’ve also been caught up in other tactics that I saw other marketers using, or listened to advice from people who told me to do it, which I’m also not proud of. For example, I’ve promoted products as an affiliate to my list, and said there is a limited number before we close the doors, and in reality the doors never closed. How is that ethical, it’s not, and again I apologize and will never do this ever again either, and if you feel I may have done this to you, and want a refund for a product you bought from me, I will refund you if you think this caused you to purchase a product and you are not happy about it, as long as you can send proof of purchase of course. However I do need to clear, I only did this on a few occasions, it was not often, but like I said I want to be transparent with everyone.
I also need to make something clear, when I have had price increases on products I own, such as my recent VideoCommissionFormula.com launch, these are real, and you can check that for yourself, as the price is now $67. And when I have done webinars and there is a special price on offer, these special deals are legitimate discounts for you all, so please don’t be mistaken there either. For example I did one for SECockpit and also SYNND and these plus others, are very real discounts and savings which I negotiate for you all.
I never make anything about false price hikes, and my sales pages are real, with real results I got, which often is why they come across as a lot less hyped up as some of the ones you see on Clickbank, although fair play to Clickbank, as they are cleaning out scammy offers these days.
So there you have my rant on being ethical when online marketing. I think you can sum it up by asking yourself, if your grandmother were to come to your website, would you feel comfortable that she, in her elderly stage of life, would be in a good hands? It’s not a hard question to answer, but it’s often a hard question to ask.
Although there’s a lot of unethical behaviour going on across the web, I think we all should strive to clean this up, and not tolerate it and most definitely not get involved in it. I’m double checking all my websites this week to make sure I don’t have ‘fake’ affiliate reviews or misleading information out there.
In addition to this, Google also wants people to build websites like this, and if you do build great sites, you will win out in the end and rank well in Google, as your sites will collect natural links and social votes, get return visitors etc…
Thanks for putting up with my rant folks, I’ll have plenty more online marketing tips coming your way soon!
Hi, my name is
Matt Carter and this is my blog. I write about various topics to do with Internet Marketing and strive to provide the best free resource for people wanting to develop online businesses. More about me..
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