The Affiliate Quandry

When a few weeks ago I introduced you to Bourland.com, I was really excited because it was providing reviews of e-books and software about AdSense and other content monetization programs without actually pushing any of those books/software. So I was naturally disappointed shortly after when Andrew Bourland decided to include affiliate links starting with his review of The Rich Jerk. Now, however, Andrew has recanted his ways and is going to stop including affiliate links in his reviews. I think that's great, because it will further the appearance of objectivity in Andrew's reviews. Not that they weren't already objective, it's just that having affiliate links sprinkled throughout the text makes it appear less objective.

This, of course, is one of the problems that anyone writing website and blog content faces: do you or do you not use affiliate links in your postings? Is it worth losing the appearance of objectivity by plugging a product or service?

The truth is that we all have different agendas. Part of this blog's purpose, of course, is to support the readers of my book and to provide added ammunition for others to buy it. To make it easy to buy, I provide you with a direct link to Amazon. In fact, I go out of my way to provide you with a quick one-click way to add the book to your Amazon shopping cart. And yes, I'm a member of Amazon's affiliate program, so if you happen to buy my book through this site I get an extra chunk of cash (very small — we're only talking about $0.60) for directing you to Amazon. But as the author of the book, you probably don't mind me using an affiliate link like that — especially if you know how much I make per copy in royalties anyhow. (Trust me, you don't make money a lot of money writing books, it's the other stuff that comes from book writing that makes authors rich. But only a few authors. Most of the unwashed masses of book authors, like myself, just do it out of fun, interest, ego and/or self-flagellation.)

The trick with using affiliate links is that they're best used with products and services that you can truly recommend. Besides Amazon, for example, I have no problem recommending my mailing list provider (AWeber) or my domain registrar (GoDaddy), because I like and use what they offer. Still, I have to think carefully about when and where to use the affiliate links for those products to not annoy and turn off my readership. Sometimes I wonder if I should be providing two links, one affiliate and one not, and let the user decide which to use. Or clearly mark them as affiliate links. But doing so would likely interfere with the flow of what I'm writing and in turn emphasize the affiliate links themselves, where before they'd be quietly buried in the text. It is a bit of a quandry, truly.

In that sense, then, being an AdSense publisher is much more palatable than being an affiliate. With AdSense, you're basically outsourcing all that nasty advertising stuff to Google so that you can concentrate on your content. You can have the appearance of objectivity because the ads get chosen automatically based on your content, not through some obvious machinations on your part to promote a product or service. I say appearance, of course, because many AdSense publishers do in fact go through machinations trying to get the “right kind” of ads to appear and cleverly positioning or otherwise emphasizing the ads (carefully, of course, to not violate the AdSense terms and conditions) in order to maximize clickthroughs.

In the end, you have to draw a line through the sand and decide how far you want to go to make money on the Internet. There are many ways to monetize content, for example, and while AdSense is perhaps the most obvious and best-known way to do it, it's not the only one. Maybe your audience won't mind if you stick affiliate links throughout the content. Maybe all they can stand are ads. It's really up to you to decide.

Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google. Subscribe to his AdSense newsletter for more tips and advice on AdSense and content monetization.

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