Hey Steemians,
I've been into online marketing for years, and it never ceases to amaze me how people will promote any crappy product for the sake of a dollar.
In case you didn't know – Affiliate marketing is where you can promote a product using a unique affiliate URL, and if anyone clicks your link and buys the product you make a commission off it. The Amazon affiliate program is called Amazon Associates and it's free to join.
Moving on ...
You only have to look on YouTube to see thousands of videos promoting products on Amazon that the creator obviously has no clue about and hasn't even bought themselves.
It's too easy to slap a video up and create a quick video advertising “The best TV's on Amazon” or “The best vacuum cleaner” (and thousands of other products) with a handy affiliate link to the Amazon page where they earn a share of the sale.
Now don^t get me wrong. I'm all for the average guy earning a few bucks where he can, but when money is involved every single product out becomes worth buying and comes with a full recommendation from the promoter.
All of a sudden nothing is bad. The creator doesn't much care of the product is actually good or not because all he or she wants is your cash.
Affiliate marketers never have a bad word to say about anything. All you ever see is “Yes, you should buy it” or “5 stars” etc etc ... no matter how good or bad the product actually is.
Just be aware when reading reviews online that the person promoting it is very likely making money if you click their link and buy it. Even Amazon products.
Annoying YouTube users ...
My next pet peeve is people who try to make money by downloading other peoples videos and re-uploading them on their own channel, in the hope of making some Adwords revenue or affiliate commissions.
YT is full of channels without any signs of original content and click-bait titles and video thumbnails. I do't know why, but this gets under my skin. I guess I hate parasites who can only make money off other peoples efforts.
Needless to say, I find it a very low level tactic.
The Story of Captcha
It's very common these days to see Captcha puzzles on a lot of websites now. You know the sort – click on the squares of this image that show street signs, or a box with two silly random words you can barely make out, that you need to type into a box.
Well, you can thank internet marketers for the invention and need for that. Marketers have long used automated tools to go out and register accounts on websites and then auto-post content with affiliate links or backlinks to their site for search engine optimization.
Gees, thanks guys. So the whole world has to suffer these annoying Captcha puzzles to stop you from using your auto-posting software to spray links on every site you can find. Thanks a bunch.
It may seem that I'm against affiliate marketing even though I do it myself, but that's not true. I only despise people who litter the net with crap in an attempt to make a few bucks. They don't care what they do or how much it disrupts the ordinary user. It's cash in the bank at any cost.
I also dislike them for fooling the general public with never ending positive reviews for any old rubbish they can make a dime off.
Perhaps the worst examples I've seen, are guys who setup websites for things like high blood pressure or diabetes. Yes, there are many sites like this for any medical condition you can think of.
All they do is grab some content from other websites and re-word it, and hey presto you have a website with a lot of content about dealing with diabetes that appears to be an authority website trying to sell you some crappy information product from Clickbank about dealing with high blood pressure or diabetes. What's more, the product probably wasn't even written by someone who has suffered from the disease in the first place.
Yes dear readers, the net is also full of information products written by people who have no clue what they're talking about, and it's super easy to do.
It's so easy to go to Upwork or Freelancer (or any outsourcing website) and post a job saying you'd like someone to write a book about Juicing or a cure for baldness or whatever you can think of. The outsourcer will go and research the subject and provide you with an eBook for about 75-100 dollars.You take the eBook and upload it to Amazon and sell it on the Kindle platform as your own work under a pen name, and with a bit of luck and a bit of work you're suddenly banking money off off Kindle. And you're using a book you didn't write, by someone who also didn't know the subject themselves either. Great.
And don't for one second think this doesn't happen. A lot of Kindle books are likely produced this way, especially health and fitness, weight loss, self help, and health issues, and any niche you can think of. The net is anonymous, and it's super easy to write a Bio saying you suffered for diabetes or whatever, and sell an eBook.
Anyway, I'll end this little rant there. I hope I've taught some of you to be a little more careful who you trust on the net.
Let me know what you think, and whether you want me to write some posts in future about making money online for yourself. Leave a comment and let me know.
Speak soon.
