Yesterday I made a post on how to pick out the best affiliate product to promote. Today’s post is in the same vein but is going to take the form more of a short rant; so strap in. Let’s be serious, there’s A LOT of crap out there when it comes to internet marketing products or digital products as it is. The ratio of worthless products on Clickbank alone versus worthwhile products is completely out of whack. Ideally if people stopped buying and promoting crappy products then publishers would stop making them; but this premise doesn’t work in Hollywood and I’m betting that it probably won’t work here, either.
Don’t Promote Bad Affiliate Products
What we can decide is what we choose to promote. I know it can be difficult to decide what it is to promote and make money on sometimes. Sometimes when we decide what we want to promote, we may face a dilemma because we know the product is crap after maybe having tested it ourselves, but its sales page is just so darn good that we have little choice.
The best metric I’ve found for deciding what to promote (and one of the points which I mentioned yesterday) is would you use this product yourself? I use every single product which I promote to my readers on this site. I know it’s not always easy, but you’ve got to keep the bigger picture in mind.
Your reader’s perception of you is far more valuable than making a quick dollar. Never pander to your readers. It’s easy to forget that we’re writing to real people on the other side of the internet, intelligent people who can make up their own minds about something.
The second that you promote something of lackluster quality, you’re going to turn off some of your readers and risk losing them. Imagine if they tried a lousy product you promoted and found very quickly just how lousy that product was. Do you think they’d stick around to hear your opinion on anything else?
You’ve spent all of that time, work, and possibly money in developing a readership. It doesn’t make sense to undo all of that in a second on a product which most of them are going to ask for a refund for anyway. You don’t have to promote every offer in your niche which comes along which it seems like some marketers have to be doing. The act of choosing quality over quantity is good advice in a lot of different scenarios and this is certainly one of them.