On being an ethical affiliate marketer

I saw a great ad for a WordPress plugin that would fit perfectly into my strategy and it’s features were 100% what I needed for my posts. It would really help me rank for my posts’ keywords much easier than before. We all need tools to help us do things more effectively don’t we?

To buy a product for my work I am asking my self the following questions:

• Will it save me time? Yes that plugin is really going to help with that.
• Is the price-tag relatively low? Yep 40-60 USD is a good price for that plugin.
• Is it easy to use even for anyone whom I outsource work to? Yeap, this plugin is a no-brainer!
• Are there many people endorsing it? Yep 39 + Marketers explicitly stated that they endorse the plugin. Seeing names that are very popular in the Internet Marketing sphere I was sure this was a very good plugin!
• Will it make my business even a bit better? Check!

So I added the time I am wasting researching, time that I would now save because the plugin does many things automatically for me and I bought it. Glad by my decision, I installed it.

After activating it I went to create a new WordPress post right away, only to find that the plugin and I’m quoting my self:

Is the worst keyword research tool I’ve used. And I’ve tried hundreds

Nothing and I mean nothing was done properly, search data was so wrong that if I gave that tool to a outsourcer he/she would get everything wrong. To give an example, the keyword “best wordpress templates” was found to be a very good keyword to target for one of my posts since it needed one backlink for me to rank on it. Need to say more?

I’m not writing this post to bash anyone, the plugin is a rather complicated one and I am sure the owner is trying really hard to make it even better but I am so pissed with all the marketers that are promoting it…

There needs to be more regulation from the FTC and the affiliate networks when it comes to products. First of all, there should be no affiliate that promotes a product that hasn’t even bought a licence for himself first. NONE! What pisses me more though is that some of the affiliate marketers even did screen casts to prove how cool the product was and even with their examples the data given back was so off that I wanted to punch the screen!

What people would do for some $30 commisions? Is it worth gaining some money and loosing your reader’s loyalty? I just removed ten feeds from my RSS reader. What an Internet Marketer should really do is to promote products that will help their audience and give value to them, not going after some more money and destroy his/her reputation.

Sorry for pissing on people’s nests but really, it was your review that made me buy the product and then ask for my money back in no time. Next time be careful of what you endorse.

Your ex Subscriber.