How Smart Bloggers Make Dumb Choices

 Do you know the pluses and minuses of affiliate marketing? Great if you do. Even if you don’t, it just takes a bit of digging behind-the-scenes to look. You’ll discover many dumb things even expert bloggers do. Here’s a sampler.

Some merchants may be above-board, but may not be a good fit for your own type of audience. Sticking with such merchants is a dumb thing to do. 


 
Regularly, some bloggers get fooled by unscrupulous merchants all in the name of business. For all you care, all the noise about a particular product may just be mere hyping and some bloggers easily get carried away by that. More often than not, these bloggers forget the cliché, “If an opportunity seems too good to be true, it probably is.” Not heeding that is exactly why many bloggers sometimes get seduced by the tactics of less ethical and unscrupulous merchants.

It is easy to find numerous tips and tricks in affiliate marketing forums that might help you make a quick buck.  Such tricks could quickly lead to a break in trust with your audience. That is not the best way to go. In any business, trust counts for much and once it is lost, a lot is lost.

Anyone, no matter how experienced and expert they are can get fooled once in a while. Here are some quick tips to help you stay safe:

Don’t promote any product until you have all the vital information you need to promote it. To get this information, be sure you’ve subscribed to your affiliate partners’ email list and know exactly what your readers can expect in terms of follow-up marketing. That leaves you on very sure and safe grounds to promote the product as expected.

Do not pay a fee to become an affiliate. That is inclusive of membership or setup fees. Most credible affiliate program are FREE to join and many even entice people with sign-up bonuses. When you see product merchants asking for fees, it is likely they are running scams. Beware!

Don’t get involved in using tricks and unethical methods to promote any product.  Some marketers habitually use aggressive SEO tactics that focus exclusively on tricking search engines to market their products. That is a very dumb thing to do even if you may record a few successes here and there. If humans don’t wise up to your tricks soon enough, search engines will and they could have you banned from search engine listings. A real disaster if that happens.