Paid Reviews and Affiliate Marketing
Many affiliates wonder how bloggers and portal owners easily get their hands on freebies. It’s easy to assume that all these folks are getting paid for their work. Some actually are. Thanks to the FTC’s latest guidelines for bloggers and online marketers, you can find out about those relationships on disclosure pages. But in many cases, those top portals are just happy to review the latest gizmos and products without getting compensated. After all, they get to keep their visitors and add more.
Paid reviews are not looked up favorably by too many people. It’s not easy to assume that one can stay unbiased when they have been paid to write a review about a product. You can argue the same for affiliate products. Would you consider criticizing a product that you are planning to refer your visitors to? We have all seen those glorious, “best in the history,” reviews for products that are absolutely terrible. Those affiliates either know they have stupid visitors or they assume their visitors are gullible.
Whether you are writing a paid review or reviewing an affiliate product, you want to be as truthful about it as possible. Gaining the trust of your visitors is often more important than making a few quick sales. Besides, if the product you are referring your visitors to is terrible, you are not only going to lose your credibility, your commission check will be gone as well. Most affiliate programs have a holding period for commissions to account for returned products. If you have picked the wrong product to promote, you are going to pay for it dearly.
Services such as CMP.ly can help affiliates (and bloggers for that matter) be more truthful and transparent with their visitors. If your visitors don’t believe that you are being honest with them after reading these disclosure statements, then you never really had a chance with them anyway. Hiding things don’t help in that regard. The most likely scenario is that your visitors will appreciate your honesty and will take that into account when making a decision to buy or not to buy the product you have reviewed from you.
The good news is affiliate reviews can be more honest than paid reviews. After all, you are not getting paid to review. You are reviewing to get paid. There is a big difference as long as you are truthful with your visitors.
