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After corporate scandals rocked the business world in the early part of the decade, it became common practice for financial programming stations (e.g. CNBC) to ensure interviewees openly disclosed any affiliation to publicly traded companies on camera.  Indeed, financial TV personalities like Maria Bartiromo went out of their way to ensure that “expert” stock recommendations were fully disclosed…demonstrating that CNBC, as a brand, was 100% serious about protecting viewers from “hot stock pushers” in the wake of the scandals.

EMBEDDED HOT PICKS ALL AROUND US?

So, what if you have a pretty big online following & you have built up some trust over time with your audience.  You start to recognize that you might be able to make some spare change by pushing products that you like on your blog.  Side Note: You really do need a HUGE audience to make any decent money doing this.  Do you fully disclose when you are affiliated with a product or a service when you add the link to the post?  Should you be transparent about your affiliation at least somewhere on your site, or in previous posts? Or, can you embed your version of a linked ‘hot pick” into your post and go to bed feeling 100% good about it?

Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with people working hard to make a living in the internet marketing world.  And while many internet marketers don’t fully disclose their affiliate status, there are some great examples of hard working internet marketing bloggers who are transparent.  One VERY transparent approach comes from Caroline Middlebrook who posts monthly earnings online (including affiliate earnings).

Full disclosure, I am part of 1 affiliate program…Amazon affiliates. And, as I posted here, half of the proceeds I receive from it go to charity.  I am now going to change that to 100% of the proceeds as of this post!

ENRON 2.0 ON THE HORIZON?

I realize that there are many out there who disagree with me.  Affiliate blogging has become pretty big business it seems as blogs are becoming very useful to internet marketers…indeed, blogs grow over time and their content is a great for driving traffic from search engines.  Tips for Affiliate Blogging even come from well-respected bloggers like Dosh Dosh (see his 4 tips below).

* The blog must provide easy access to information that is perceived as authentic or even ‘objective’

* The blog should practice invisibility. The consumer should not know that you are doing affiliate marketing, i.e. getting a cut of the product sold. Debatable.

* The blog should evolve seamlessly to include other product or market trends.

* The blog should have a personality and opinion. In the end, it’s a person-to-person recommendation that does the trick.

I don’t know about you, but #1 & 2 seem pretty shady (even Maki notes that #2 is debatable)

So, will we, at some point, have a big blowout scandal where affiliate blogging is brought even more out into the limelight?  Will some larger online scandal arise in the not to distant future and awaken people to all the tactics used out there to get people to click on links?

There are marketing bloggers like Seth Godin who take a more journalistic view of the blogosphere.  Seth’s self published blog stays free of entanglements and affiliations.  I prefer this approach.  Over the long run, I think full disclosure can even help you develop more trust with your community.

Why not disclose that you are giving some of the funds to one of your favorite causes?

What do you all think?