The Truth About Affiliate Marketing

It can be sleazy

I did an MBA because I needed to make money, not out of any great love of the business world. I’d wanted to be a history professor, but after the master’s I came to the conclusion that was impractical if I wanted to stay happily married. There weren’t a lot of want ads for guys with master’s degrees in military history, so I whipped through an MBA on a fast track, focusing on marketing because it utilized my writing skill. And I did that career for a dozen years and I was okay at it, but I sure didn’t love it. 

I thought a lot marketing was kind of sleazy, but I was fortunate to work for places where I didn’t have to do anything that made me uncomfortable. Then I got into the fitness world and discovered just how sleazy the marketing could be. I could have made a lot of money as a fitness writer had I been willing to play that game. 

Back when I began writing about fitness in 2009, there were a ton of weight loss ebooks on the market. I wrote a piece for the LA Times about such online marketing shenanigans. One of the sleazy things was related to affiliate marketing. The fuck is affiliate marketing?

It’s when someone sells an online product via proxies for a cut. One of the most famous was an ebook titled The Truth About Abs. From what I understand, the author gave 70% of the revenue to his affiliates. So if he sold an ebook for $50, the affiliate who made the sale got $35. And that $15 cut was fine with the author, because he was all about volume. Selling a PDF document has no additional manufacturing associated with it. The more you sell the more you make, no matter the percentage. 

I never read the book, so I have no idea what kind of content was being sold, but I do know that a lot of these weight loss / muscle building ebooks did have some highly unscrupulous affiliates selling for them. One example was in trying to get a proper review of any of these ebooks. As I mentioned in the LA Times article, if you googled the name of the book followed by the word “scam” or “ripoff”, you found a ton of links to pages titled “Is [book title] a scam? We tell you the TRUTH!” And what you find is a glowing review of 4.5 out of 5 stars and a link to buy. And yeah, it’s their affiliate link. Because money. Any kind of real review was impossible to find because of such google spamming. 

There were tons of these ebooks sold via affiliate links and the tactics were often the same and so were the fake reviews. It was practically automated, with little difference between these reviews except for the names of the books. Many of them even used the same before and after body transformation photos. I understand that some of these authors made a whole lot of money from their ebooks. But no fucking way I was doing that. I wasn’t going to sell ebooks that way and I wasn’t going to be an affiliate for them.

But that doesn’t mean there is anything inherently wrong with affiliate marketing. It’s just been misused by many via sleazy tactics. Affiliate marketing can be used ethically, if you’re selective in who you permit to sell your product. 

Over the past few years I’ve been an affiliate for Balance365, a program that deals in emotional eating and self-sabotage. For every subscription I sold, I made money. I have been an affiliate because I know and respect Annie Brees and Jennifer Campbell, the two women who run the program. Interestingly, every time I promoted it, which was about twice a year, their clients would spontaneously show up in the comments leaving real reviews about the program about how it changed their lives. And I wasn’t the only one being selective regarding such affiliate marketing. Annie and Jennifer only had a very select few who they let be their affiliates because they didn’t want anyone using sleazy sales tactics. 

And this time around I’m not even selling anything. This link is to sign up for a free 3-day workshop that begins on August 24. If you can’t watch the videos live, you can still access them later. The workshop gets into the aforementioned emotional eating and self-sabotage, why you do it, and how to stop it. 

And yes, even though it’s free I get money for everyone who subscribes. It’s a program for women only, and I’ve never heard a single complaint after sending many hundreds of women their way. But I have heard much praise. So check it out and see if it’s right for you.