Copy Brighter

Running an affiliate program is incredibly dangerous for those concerned about their online reputation. Here's why:

This Google results page casts a heavy doubt on the Rich Jerk's reputation.

By paying people to promote your product, you are giving your affiliates (and their competitors) direct incentive to create content about you and your brand.

And you have very little, if any, control over what they say about you.

In the first decade of online affiliate marketing (the 90's), people mostly stuck to the positive. They would create glowing reviews about products that offered commissions. And they would give the highest rating to products that paid the highest commissions.

But just as television content is becoming more shocking, more explicit, and more edgy to maintain waning levels of viewer attention... affiliate marketing is getting meaner and more cut-throat, also.

The Dark Side: Anti-Marketing

The dark side of affiliate marketing is based on a simple flaw of human psychology - where "bad news sells better than good news." Reverse psychology works well and bad reviews are much more magnetic than positive stuff. The trade term for this kind of promotion style is "anti-marketing."

I blame The Rich Jerk as the person primarily responsible for pushing this trend to the tipping point, by teaching it as a premium "secret marketing technique" to thousands of newbie affiliates in his ebook. Nowadays, it has become standard practice for affiliates to declare your product a "scam" in the title and description tags, in order to get more attention and clicks. They will viscously bash your product and try to send you to a landing page for a competing product that pays them better commission:

This page (rightfully) bashes a product in order to promote affiliate links for a competing product.

Even affiliates who wholeheartedly believe in your product - who are actively trying to promote it - will engage in anti-marketing nastiness, in order to get more attention and clicks:

This affiliate page uses a highly sensational title and description to promote the program.

The Downward Spiral

The negative meme tends to spread quickly, regardless if there is any evidence to support it. It incubates when pay-per-click gets oversaturated with dirty ads. Average people who are interested in your program read the affiliate pages proclaiming that "it's a scam!," and they start posting on blogs and forums to ask if it's really a scam or not. Before long, the top organic listings fill with a dirty speedball of libelous affiliate pages and skeptical user generated content - casting a nasty shadow of doubt on your good reputation.

At this point, your brand is permanently stigmatized and your conversions will drop off sharply.

Suggestions for Affiliate Marketers:

1. If you run your own affiliate program, make it an explicit part of your terms and conditions that "anti-marketing" is not allowed, and people who advertise your program as a "scam" will be promptly and permanently removed from the program. Make this clear up front. But be tactful: A booted, disgruntled affiliate who knows how to promote pages is potentially very dangerous. He can easily turn to an affiliate competitor who strongly encourages him to bash your brand.
   
   
2. If pay-per-click ads get out of control with negative dirt, you can try to register your trademark with AdWords (or another PPC network) and prevent people from using it. The specific rules and enforcement vary from network to network.
   
   
3. Most importantly: Start building a formidable front page presence of strong pages and profiles before your affiliates and competitors do. Let the peanut gallery affiliate pages show up on page 3 - taking a back seat to the solid portfolio of pages, subdomains, press releases, profiles and blogs that you already created and populated LONG BEFORE they ever heard about your program.
   
   

Even if you aren't running an affiliate program, learn from the drama in the industry. Understand how easily third party anti-marketing can damage your legitimate business without cause. Start building your web profile now and don't wait until it's too late, because repairing your online reputation is much more expensive and SEO labor-intensive than preventive reputation management.

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