Defining 'Acceptable Affiliate Practices' - A Joint Project?

[drmani]

This issue impacts all affiliate marketers.

There's been a furor on many marketing forums in the last 48 hours related to a questionable affiliate marketing tactic.

It prompted me to spend some time thinking about creating a set of informal 'guidelines' for 'Acceptable Affiliate Practices'.

To set the ball rolling, I posted this to my blog.

Any comments, enhancements, additions and feedback is welcome.

Let's together make affiliate marketing better, nicer, and more profitable - for EVERYONE.

Here are 5 rules I use to guide my thinking about affiliate promotions to an audience of interested prospects:

1. Respect the chain - both upstream and down. Vendors create products or services, process orders and handle customer support. Buyers consume what they purchase - and benefit from it. Affiliates are in the middle, playing matchmaker to bring buyer and seller together. Respect for the chain means striving for win-win deals that benefit everyone - and harm no one. A quick 'rule of thumb' to decide whether or not to do something is to ask oneself: "Will it harm any part of the chain?"

2. Review with empathy - It's simple. Put yourself in your buyer's position. Review the product or service you are promoting as an affiliate just the way you would like it to be done for you. Focus on benefits and risks, as perceived by your buyer. Don't 'sell' in a way you would not like to be sold to.

3. Research your recommendations - The best practice would be to personally buy (or ask to review) the thing you are recommending. Put it through the paces, see how effectively it works. Only if it passes your rigorous testing, promote it to your prospects. If this is not practical, research as much as possible about the item, the vendor, the industry, the market, and use your best judgement about the value it will provide in your affiliate recommendation - making it explicit and clear that you have not personally tested it out.

4. Add value - Focus on bringing more value to the transaction. Your buyer should ideally feel better about ordering through your recommendation than by doing it directly from the vendor. You could do this by saving your prospect time, effort or money in arriving at a buying decision.

5. Offer bonuses - within reason. Adding extra bonuses to a product, converting it into a 'package' is an excellent, effective affiliate marketing tactic. It is also often abused. Strive to enhance your buyer's experience by carefully selecting the bonuses you throw in. Targeting them to your buyer's needs is more important than the number, price or size of your bonus pack.

There are many other 'rules' that would likely fit into this document, as we refine and enhance the concept. Maybe there is even a role for an informal industry-specific agency that would expand on the AAP guidelines, making them increasingly better and more effective.

Would you like to add or modify these rules? Post to your blog and send me a link to drmani (at) ezinemarketingcenter (dot) com and I'll add it here. I will also tag all posts related to this idea with the tag "affiliateacceptablepractices" on del.icio.us

To see the post on my blog, go to

http://www.EzineMarketingCenter.com/warrior/

All success

Dr.Mani