UnMarketing: Stop Marketing. Start Engaging, Revised and Updated

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Affiliates

ANOTHER ISSUE WITH transparency, one that the FTC has recently caused a huge stir about, is affiliate links—using affiliates for your business, and being an affiliate for someone else’s business. There are many benefits to having and/or being an affiliate, but there are also pitfalls. An affiliate is somebody who acts as almost an independent sales rep for your product or service. Affiliates became popular online when web sites started to use cookies. A cookie is something that is placed on your computer that recognizes who sent you there in the first place.

Here is how it works. A vendor or business owner sets up a form on the shopping cart of the web site where you can sign up to become an affiliate. From the information on the form, a unique affiliate link for you is generated that allows you to send people to the page. In turn, when you promote that person’s business, and send traffic to their site, the link logs the fact that you were the one who sent them there. This means that if a person buys something immediately or even in the future,¹⁰⁹ you get credit for the sale. You then make a commission that is preset by the vendor—from 5 percent up to 95 percent, depending on the industry. Digital products like e-books or online courses can offer a higher affiliate percentage because they have no cost of delivery or hard cost of goods.

The transparency issue here is that most of the time an affiliate link is masked. This means that you can’t tell that the person ...