The views on disclosing affiliate links differs widely.
A while back Weblog Tools Collection introduced Text Link Ads (referral) with a referral link and Matt quickly pointed out that referral links should be disclosed.
Later, another post was quick to point out that the link is not a referral.
What is your opinion on disclosing affiliate links?
Having been on the reader’s side and now standing on the publisher side, I know the debate well.
As a reader, I do not like to be tricked into clicking on referral links. I had even seen link saying something but linking to another. However I do not mind giving the publisher the referral if the information is useful. Anyway it is someone else that is paying, so why not make someone happy.
As a publisher, the concern is readers bypassing the referral. Each click is a potential earning and if I can get more people to click, all the better.
Is there a balance?
My decision is to disclose affiliate referral using the title attributes in the link tag and if necessary mentioning it. I hope the reader will appreciate this action as a sincere introduction and give me the referral if I deserve it.
How do you decide?
I talk about the need to seek different source of revenue so that not all the eggs are put in the same basket.
A few days ago I just received a Paypal credit for a program that I had joined. So I know this is a real, tried and tested program that I can recommend to you.
The company is called eNMarketing and they run 3 programs – Cardfountain, TrustyHound and FunnyTaf affiliate programs.
So far I find the CardFountain program most effective as it pays $0.50 for anyone that sign up and send an ecard from their service. The cards are well designed and especially the talking card is unique.
They payout using Paypal when your earning reaches $25. That means you just need 50 people to send out the cards to receive your earning.
Besides ecards, there are free downloads, screensavers that may appeal to your visitors.
Sign up is free, so why not give it a try? (Links contains my affiliate links.)
Everyday I get emails from some famous marketer or people talking about some famous marketer.
I did subscribe to the some of the newsletters but it is anyone’s guess how the others got to my email.
Anyway, I’m not talking about spam today. I cannot take all these name dropping marketing plot anymore!
Here’s an example,
I was speaking with Cody Moya the other day (a well-known Internet Marketer), and he started talking about his main profitability secret.
He told me how he was able to earn close to half million dollars on the Internet because of just one success factor.
Here’s another
Last March I met a marketer named Joe Cooper from the UK, at a meeting in Washington DC. What I liked most about him is that he’s just an all-around nice kid, and in spite of being an up-and-coming hotshot marketer, he really didn’t care about impressing people at the event.
Now tell me, how many of you know these guys?
There are more. You could easily make a list and I’m going to try this experiment,
- Make a list of all the names mentioned in the next 1 week.
- List these names and see if you have heard of them.
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